Nursing education…Official emphasises need for reduced student-tutor ratio

Mar 18, 2017 News

---

– decries “too large” class sizes

A major downfall in nursing education was first brought to the fore after the 2010 intake of students in the country’s nursing schools. The intake then, according to a health official, was too massive when the complement of staff was taken into consideration. The official revealed that this move was, in fact, a political decision, and thus officials within the system were not willing to voice their concerns.
The intake in the Georgetown School of Nursing, for instance, amounted to about 267 students per classroom. Understandably, over time the enormous class sizes became unrealistic and both tutors and students began to signal concern through various forms of protest action.
Moves were made to address the situation but this, the official related, was not nearly enough. “From 267 per class, they decided to reduce the classes in two, but that was still an oversized class and still unrealistic…it was just a big fiasco,” the official noted.
The “disastrous” outcome, the official said was not unexpected, when the examination results of the 2013/2014 were unveiled.
“Those exams would have been disastrous because we had extremely large groups, far too few faculties…there were simply not sufficient resources in the classroom,” said the official, who revealed that although monies were reportedly donated to help improve nursing education a number of years ago, measures in this regard were not seen as important.
“Monies were made available to improve nursing education and promises were made to do this and that, instead those responsible refused to properly utilise this to address the problems that existed, and still do in the system,” the official revealed.
“The results of the 2010 intake were the worse that the system had ever seen,” said the official, who weighed-in on the results of the most recent sitting of the country’s 2016 Professional Nurses State Final Examination, calling it “equally disastrous”.
The recent examination was first administered in October of 2016, but following its completion, there were allegations that the examination papers were leaked prior to the sitting of the examination. A total of 179 students were required to re-sit the examination last month, but based on the results seen by this publication, only 23 (just under 13%) of the lot, from across the nursing schools, secured overall passes.
The nursing schools that participated in the State Finals were the Georgetown School of Nursing, the New Amsterdam School of Nursing, the Charles Roza School of Nursing and the privately-operated St. Joseph Mercy Hospital.
The official is convinced that the number of students in the classroom in the public nursing schools, in addition to a number of other factors, is still having a major impact on the results. But this may, however, be a tall task for the local nursing schools at this point. This is in light of the fact, the official noted, that there simply is not enough staff within the public nursing schools.
He noted that while at the university level, large class sizes can be acceptable, the limited staff at the nursing school may not allow this to be possible.
“Universities can do that because they have more faculties and they have more systems in place where a lecturer could carry a course with a hundred- or 200-plus students,” said the official.
“This is because they have a formula where every 10 students are a part of a tutorial group. There is somebody who is working with the lecturer to help, and when it comes to the clinical exposure, again there is a formula where there are one to four students to a lecturer. But of course in a country like Guyana, I wouldn’t say that we can go one to four, but maybe one to eight could be possible,” the official related.
According to the official, those tasked with managing the nursing schools should recognise that the issue that needs to be addressed is “if you increase numbers, you have to match it with the resources and that didn’t happen.”
But there were efforts implemented to help address the shortcomings, the official noted, and this reportedly saw an improvement in the performance in 2015. But according to the official, the improvements seemed to have collapsed, given the performance of the re-sit, which seems to be on par with the performance of those admitted to the programme in 2010.
Nursing students are usually given the opportunity to re-sit examinations on three occasions. They are, however, given a fourth opportunity, but as a private candidate.
However, the official revealed that on the three occasions allowed, tutors are faced with a major challenge, since they are tasked with “dealing with those repeating the programme as well as those among the new intake for a particular year.”

---

---