Dear Editor,
Well, after resitting, only 23 of the 179 candidates secured overall passes at the Nurses State Final Examination. The Nursing Council with its chequered past is tasked with setting the examination, taken by students of the country’s four nursing schools: Georgetown School of Nursing, the Charles Roza School of Nursing, the New Amsterdam School of Nursing and privately-operated St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital. Numbers don’t lie, the results reveal an abysmal state of affairs, and one is left wondering whether the breaching by the council, though in itself a wrong, was not a blessing of sorts.
Contrary to the belief of the Junior Minister of Public Health, Dr Karen Cummings, the results further affirm that the nurses in question did not know their onions, garlic, yet alone their eschallots.
It is evident that there are individuals who are fully aware that the nurses even on completion of training are not up to the required standard. The situation brings into question the calibre of prospective nurse trainees, the required admission qualifications for both nurses and nursing instructors, and above all the nursing curriculum, or who is teaching who, what and how.
Has the nursing shortage forced the respective training schools to lower their admission standards and requirements? In some teaching contexts the instructors are expected to get a bell curve of grades to show that they are teaching to meet expectations.
The question of accountability for nursing education also needs to be addressed, because nursing instructors may see their role as simply forwarding and dispensing knowledge, and neglect the need to know how to be great educators. Many of the nursing instructors have never been officially trained as educators, and will have either a Masters’ degree or no graduate degree at all, just nursing background and experience. They will not have undergone any formal training in how to evaluate the learning needs of students, or how to develop learning tools to assist nursing students achieve satisfactory programme outcomes. In addition they cannot evaluate student performance outside of an exam score, or assist students at the margins to develop corrective plans to address unassimilated concepts or content. Therein may lie the crux of the problem. Should the nursing instructors be held accountable for the student’s outcome? Most certainly!
If nurses are held accountable for patient outcomes, then in like manner nurses in educational practice should be held accountable for student outcomes.
The nursing instructors must be made aware of their responsibilities to create lifelong learners and not just assist nurses to prepare themselves to pass a one-time final nursing examination.
The present breach has served its purpose – it has laid bare the flaws of the entire nursing and nursing education system, although some nurses may have previously benefited from it.
The entire nurse training programme, nurse selection, nursing curriculum and nursing instructors must be rigidly scrutinized, evaluated and remedial measures put in place as necessary. Those at the General Nursing Council responsible for the breach should be pursued to the full extent of the law, along with all identified accomplices.
An entirely new body working in conjunction with the Minister and Ministry of Health should be created to oversee the nursing curriculum, the setting of the nursing examination, the distribution, collection and tabulation of the results. It is only in so doing that nursing education can have an effect on the ability of the profession to uphold and transmit its core values in order to provide nurses who will make intelligent judgements, thereby keeping patients safe.
Yours faithfully,
Yvonne Sam
