Regional nursing body engages CXC at Caricom meeting

Mar 04, 2017 News

– improving exam high on agenda

Moves to improve the regional nursing examination have been gaining keen attention at the level

CXC Registrar, Glenroy Cumberbatch

of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Deliberations in this regard have been channelled through the Regional Nursing Body (RNB) which, since Monday, has been holding its annual interim meeting at the Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown CARICOM Secretariat.
High on the agenda has been the performance of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC)-managed Regional Examination for Nurse Registration (RENR).
According to Deputy RNB Chair and Chief Nursing Officer in Barbados, Dr. Wendy Sealy, the RNB is a body that convenes twice annually. The Guyana meeting, she said, represents the RNB sub-committee meeting.
“Among other matters, we do discuss the regional exam for nurses’ registration which has from October 2014 been administered by the CXC,” said Dr. Sealy, as she revealed that “at every meeting we have a report from the Council with respect to the matters surrounding the examination.”
But the foregoing represents no major development. What was, however, deemed notable of the meeting, was the fact that CXC Registrar, Mr Glenroy Cumberbatch, was in attendance.
The reason for Cumberbatch’s attendance, according to Dr. Sealy, was to discuss some matters that require strengthening and improvement of the examination going forward.
According to Cumberbatch, “after three years of conducting the examination on behalf of the Council, there are certain aspects that we see that can be improved, and we are spending some time having those discussions.”

Dr. Wendy Sealy, Deputy RNB Chair

For this reason, the CXC Registrar pointed out that focus has not only been directed to the performance of nursing students, but also, the actual examination.
“The instrument that you use must be able to pull out or elicit from the students the kind of boundaries that we are looking for in those candidates and we want to be very sure that we are measuring the right things, and that the students are benefiting and are getting reliable scores out of that process,” Cumberbatch asserted.
As part of the process, he noted that “we were discussing ‘how do we link the clinical practice and the clinical exercise of what is being done in the examination’…the best way to capture the information itself or to use what is done when the nurses are doing their practicum and other areas.”
He disclosed that efforts were made to ascertain “how do we get that in and what process do we use to bring that across…We [have] also looked to see how do we share the information that we have now, between the colleges and universities where the nurses are trained…this will then feedback into the process of how they teach.”
In so doing, Cumberbatch said that there is a likelihood of being better able to use the examination as a tool to better identify some of the weaknesses that the students may have.
“Among those things, we feel that if we can move in a direction to make better links, provide reports with more narratives that persons can follow, rather than just statistics, that will also help in better preparing candidates and better assessing to put those people out to practice nursing in the region,” the Registrar added.
The resulting recommendations from the RNB will more than likely have to be brought to the attention of Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) for approval before they can be implemented.
Currently, the Ministry of Public Health is looking to adopt the tactic of the RNB to embrace the services of CXC to prepare and administer national nursing examinations. This development comes on the heels of a breach of the examination which was administered in October of last year, which was linked to individuals within the Guyana Nursing Council – the very body that was tasked with setting the examination.
This state of affairs had resulted in the Public Health Ministry depending on the Education Ministry to prepare and administer a re-sit of the breached examination last month.

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