Nursing examination…Health Minister touts intensified pre-screening of nursing students

Jun 29, 2014 News

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…in quest to reduce failure rate

In what may be an attempt to garner sustained acceptable performances at the country’s Nursing Examinations

delivered by the Ministry of Health, moves may be made to adopt an intense pre-screening process.
This potential development was highlighted by Minister of Health, Dr Bheri Ramsaran, who during an interview related that such a strategy is one that is already being embraced by private education institutions.
“Certain private schools I think do pre-screening of their students so as to guarantee more favourable passes,” he reflected.
And perhaps it was such a tactic that was employed by the Nursing School operated by the privately-run St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, which represents one of the four Nursing Schools of the country.
According to the Minister, the private nursing school, possibly because of its quality student intake is one institution that consistently produces good performances.
At the most recent national nursing examinations, the Minister said that the private nursing school entered about seven students. He pointed out that while that is a small number to take into consideration, there is no doubt that the percentage pass rate was laudable enough to be recognised, since six of the seven passed all of the multiple papers of the examination while one failed partially, indicative by failure of one paper.
The Minister’s remarks were forthcoming even as he deliberated on the level of failure that the public nursing schools have been seeing in certain areas in recent times. This development occurred among students of the three public entities – Georgetown, New Amsterdam and Charles Roza in Linden.
Moreover, Minister Ramsaran noted that the onus is now on his Ministry “to go back to the drawing board and decide what is the way forward taking into consideration the figures that we are seeing.”
While he did not divulge to this publication the specifics of the results, in an interview with the Government Information Agency (GINA) the Minister disclosed that while the four recognised Nursing Schools in Guyana have shown a lot of improvement in individual areas, when the grades were combined it showed that some individuals were strong in one area while weak in another, resulting in them failing.
He said that this can be broken down to 83 per cent in Functional Nursing Paper One and 27 per cent in Paper Two; 61 per cent passes in Clinical Nursing Paper One and 70 per cent in Paper Two along with 79 per cent in Practicals.
The Charles Roza Nursing School, the Minister disclosed, showed some form of improvement as the results show a 92 per cent pass in Functional Nursing Paper One as opposed to 60 per cent in 2013 and 46 per cent in Paper Two as opposed to 20 per cent last year.
Also, in the area of Clinical Nursing, there have been improvements as well, evident by a 50 per cent pass rate in Paper One as against 23 per cent last year, while Paper Two saw a 72 per cent success as against 30 per cent last year. This school also showed improvement in the practical exam, resulting in an 83 per cent pass as opposed to 57 per cent last year.

At the New Amsterdam Nursing School there was a 100 per cent rate in Functional Nursing Paper One and 49 per cent in Paper Two, while in Clinical Nursing there was 46 per cent passes in Paper One and 76 per cent in Paper Two. There was a 46 per cent in Practicals.
Minister Ramsaran in analysing the results presented to him, said that Georgetown recorded the majority of the failures, with the poorest area being a 12 per cent pass in Functional Nursing Paper Two. According to him, the overall pass percentage was found to be significantly low.
He went on to explain that since the public sector allows individual students to re-sit the exams they would have failed, it was found that the vast majority of the ‘re-sitters’ were among the failures. The recent sitting of the examination saw a total of 19 students repeating all papers of the nursing examination, as they had failed these last year.
Moreover, Minister Ramsaran said that his Ministry will be paying more close attention to the re-sit policy.
“I am wondering if we should keep giving them this chance…they have up to three chances because lo and behold, every one of those 19 angels, given the chance, failed again,” disclosed the Health Minister.
He added that “we at the Ministry are wondering if we should be more stringent with our dismissal procedures, because we have sat with our economists and planners and crunched the numbers, and we see that probably because this too democratic or liberal approach to exam-taking, we are potentially losing a significant amount of money.”
Currently, nursing students are afforded a monthly stipend of close to $20,000 which, when tallied up, represents a significant loss when students repeatedly fail examinations.
“The argument in the past was once you invest (for example) in a young lady to become a nurse, if you dismiss her without giving a second chance that initial transfer of an investment would have been lost…and since we have been stringently enforcing the academic requirements, we were being a bit lenient in giving them a second chance,” Dr. Ramsaran said. And since the performance of the St Joseph Nursing School reflected 100 per cent pass rate in all of the written exams and 67 per cent in the practicals, the Minister told this publication that moves will have to urgently be zeroed in on the shortcomings in the public nursing schools.  “My Director of training, Mr Wilton Benn, has indicated that the paper where they seem to do badly is one which we probably need to look over. Is the curriculum being delivered as is expected? Are certain things needing to be presented differently, we are still in the process of discussion…”
But according to the Minister there is currently no need for panic, as the Ministry “just needs to start crunching the figures differently and probably having less re-sits, because if we didn’t have almost 20 people re-sitting we would have gotten significantly better results.”
Once this state of affairs is effectively addressed, Minister Ramsaran noted, not only human resources will be better utilised but financial resources as well.

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