Revision and adjustment of nursing programme may counter failure – Asst Nursing Director

May 17, 2014 News

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An urgent revision of the nursing programme is perhaps one of the crucial factors in countering an alarming failure rate among students who participated in the Professional Nursing programme last year. This conviction was voiced by Assistant Director of Nursing at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), Brother Owen John.

“The way I see it is that if you have a situation where you are having a high failure rate for people that you would have screened and brought in to be trained…it means that these people were qualified and therefore it means that something is wrong with the programme,” intimated Brother John.
Moreover, he is convinced that an 11 per cent failure rate among the Professional Nursing students across the country is perhaps not the fault of the students themselves. “This says something about the programme and so I would not want to necessarily blame the students; of course they would have to bear some level of responsibility but this did not happen at one nursing school, this happened across the country,” noted Brother John.
The Professional Nursing Programme, according to him, is standard at all nursing schools – Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Charles Roza and St. Joseph Mercy – all of which recorded alarming failure rates.  “How come all of these people failed this one exam?  These are people with a lot of CXCs but yet they failed these exams,” said the Assistant Nursing Director who expressed his belief that there is need for the Professional Nursing Programme to be examined and some adjustments made.
In the past, he disclosed that the School of Nursing fell under the purview of the Georgetown Hospital but is currently managed directly by the Ministry of Health.  “So what you find is that control over the nursing students is no longer there. The hospital in the past had the opportunity, for example, to plan the nurses’ rotations but that doesn’t even happen anymore,” said Brother John. This development, according to him, has created a void in terms of the exposure the nurses in training are permitted.
Added to this, there have been some talks, in the recent past, about the professionals best suited to deliver nursing education. With the move by the Ministry of Health to increase the intake of nursing students over the years coupled with the migration of some qualified nurses, moves were made to channel the expertise of some other professionals, outside of nursing, towards pedagogy.
In fact Brother John is convinced that “the whole health care landscape has been robbed of very, very good quality health care workers who have migrated to various parts of the world…so what we have is the “ravelling.”
However, it is the view of Brother John that the preference is to have nurses teach nurses. He explained that since the utilisation of other professionals to fill the gap is linked to the paucity of nursing professionals to function as nursing educators, efforts should be made to retain the good quality nurses.  “Apparently some people seem to feel the way to do it is just train more nurses, but who is to supervise and manage them?” questioned Brother John.
He asserted though that “there is however no disputing that, doctors could and are playing a meaningful role in nurses’ education; but nurses, in my opinion, can better understand nursing issues,” said Brother John.
However it remains the belief of some that nursing education should be the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, Brother John noted. This, according to him, would mean that the Education Ministry would be required to recruit professionals with sound health education backgrounds to undertake such a task.
In the meantime though, he is convinced that “a lot more could be done; but right now there are too many gaps and until we get to that point where we can really deal with some of the issues we have, we will continue to struggle in this area.”
According to him, there are a number of fundamental areas that must be addressed in nursing care. He emphasized the need for intensified moves towards reducing the operational pressure at the GPHC, for instance, even as he pointed out how challenging it usually is to cater to the needs of patients from across the country. “Our resources here are overwhelmed…people from all over the place are coming here; people are bypassing all of the other regional hospitals to come to the GPHC and our nurses can’t cope with the volume of work,” said Brother John.
Moreover, he is concerned that “people just don’t understand the underlying factors sometimes,” when there are some unfortunate deaths at the GPHC. “We are taxed with too much work and people just don’t see that,” said Brother John who has been a nurse for just over four decades. “We are not like the police who (may) get a reward for capturing a criminal; we have, at times, one or two nurses with 40 patients and if somebody dies under those nurses’ watch they are lambasted in the press,” stressed Brother John.
In fact he is convinced that if nurses in some developed countries were to operate under the pressure that some nurses here work they would be hailed as heroes.
Nevertheless, Brother John noted that another daunting situation that obtains in nursing today is that some persons who enter the system are merely “seeking an income and are in fact not passionate about the profession.”

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