President of the Guyana Nurses Association (GNA) Norma Semple says the GNA will work with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to ensure the recommendations made to help alleviate the high failure rate of nurses are institiuted.
She noted that the GNA is a professional umbrella body and as such, it is limited as to what it can do to curb the problem of failing nurses.
“The association is a professional umbrella body so we have to work with the ministry, we are not a workers’ union, so we can’t remedy the problem by ourselves,” Semple said.
At a press conference a few weeks ago, Leader of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) called for a complete re-evaluation of nurses training to improve patient care and expressed concerns for the high failure rate of nurses at the October sitting of the nursing examination.
It was stated that of the 120 students enrolled at the Georgetown School of Nursing who wrote the examination, only 19 were successful.
In addition, at the start of the three-year programme, 255 students had entered the Professional Nursing Programme in April 2010 but only 120 of them persevered to write the final examination.
GNA had made a series of suggestions, which it felt would help alleviate the situation and improve the passing rate of nurses if they were looked at by the MOH. GNA and APNU had blamed the student/teacher ratio.
GNA also said it was not in favour of students being enrolled for nursing who do not fit the stipulated criteria for implementation of the curriculum as this, among other factors was to be blamed for the high failure rate of nursing students.