US nursing board council says the World is monitoring test leak outcome

From the Malaya:

The leakage in the June 2006 nursing examinations has caused the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing Inc. (NCSBN) to put off its decision on whether to include the Philippines among its international testing centers, a top official of NCSBN said yesterday.
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"Obviously, it (leakage) has affected (our decision) because we were set to make a decision. When the leakage occurred, we decided to back off to get the results of how you handle that," Fields said in an ambush interview after her courtesy call on Arroyo.

Fields said the board is watching how the Philippine government will handle the leakage issue. "We will definitely be waiting for the outcome of the issue," she said.

She said Filipino nurses make up about 80 percent of foreign educated nurses that come to the US.

"We’re very interested to see how you handle the crisis and I think it’s something that you don’t want to waste the opportunity to make your system better," she said.

She said doing nothing about the leakage issue would be "a mistake."

"You have to understand that the entire world is watching what the Philippines does here and so you definitely will need to take some action. But what that is, is up to the Philippines to do," she added.

More from Rina Jimenez David:

I DON'T know if this applies only to the Philippines, but educational trends here are actually dictated, not by employment and market demands in the country, but by market demand abroad, specifically in the United States, and by labor and migration policies of the US and other "destination" countries.

In my teens, all of us five sisters felt tremendous pressure from my mother, whose lifelong dream had been that at least one of her daughters would become a nurse, emigrate, earn dollars and send home the money. Even better would be if one of us would earn a coveted "green card" and send for her and install her into a life of blissful retirement in the US.

Of course, in keeping with the usual run of such stories, none of us chose my mother's career path of choice.

Eventually, her dream of sending abroad a nurse-daughter faded, not because Mama had reconciled herself to our personal ambitions, but because the demand for nurses, especially in the US, tapered off. Tough immigration policies made it difficult for Filipino nurse-applicants to enter the US, unless there was an actual job waiting for them.

But while demand for nurses abated, demand for other types of workers heated up: physical therapists, caregivers, and eventually, teachers. Such spikes in demands for specific occupations were met by corresponding spikes in enrolment in these courses in local schools. And woe to students who found themselves in the middle of a two-year or four-year course when the trend shifted downward, they were suddenly rendered unemployable. But those were the breaks to students and their parents banking on overseas employment: it was all a gamble.

* * *

THESE days, young people and their parents are banking on a nursing degree and passing the board exams yet again as a surefire way of obtaining a high-paying job abroad. With high demand matched with accommodating policies, working as a nurse in the US and the rest of the developed world has become a viable option again.

In true Filipino fashion, and based on the "lechon manok and hot pan de sal" school of business development, nursing schools and training hospitals, alongside nursing review centers, mushroomed all across the metropolis and in urban centers around the country. When education authorities, including the deans of the older and more established nursing schools and colleges, talk of the "commercialization" and the "falling standards" of nursing education, they refer mainly to the many "upstart" nursing centers, which churn out graduates who receive only minimal and sub-standard training.

And then, to ensure that these graduates meet the minimum requirement of nursing employment -- getting a passing grade in the nursing board exam -- the schools send them to classes in review centers they either established themselves or are allied with. And because a review center's reputation rests on the number of passers it manages to produce, these centers resort to all means fair or foul to even the odds.

* * *

THAT those who pass the board exams relying on leaked questions and close coaching would end up as incompetent nurses who present a threat to the lives and health of patients seems to be of little concern to such nursing "educators."

Even worse, the pressure to increase the number of passers among their graduates has led to schools and centers corrupting the very system designed to weed out the competent from the incompetent, the skilled from the unskilled, the knowledgeable from the ignorant.

In an earlier interview, Professional Regulation Commission Chair Leonor Tripon-Rosero bristled at talk that the results of the nursing board exams is the indicator of the quality of nursing education in the country. "The test only measures what a nursing graduate knows at that particular time. The quality of a graduate's education depends on the knowledge and skills imparted by the institution itself."

But it is passing the licensure exam that vouches for a nurse's basic competency, which is why test-takers and reviewers resort to short cuts and inside knowledge to gain an advantage.

A news report says the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) is preparing a new regulation that would make sure that a review center that has been involved in a "controversy" would no longer be able to do business. The report has been taken as referring to the three review centers implicated by the National Bureau of Investigation in the leakage.

Like I said before, it is important that a full retake of the exams is needed. At parusahan rin ang mga review centers na responsable sa leak.