Revamp of nursing programme still ongoing

May 16, 2017 News

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-but Minister still awaits blueprint of improvement plan
Revamping the nursing education programme is still a work in progress. In fact, this publication was informed that a blueprint detailing proposed changes to improve the nursing sector in its entirety is yet to be presented to

Minister of Public Health, Ms. Volda Lawrence.
In March of this year, this publication was informed that Minister Lawrence requested of those responsible for nursing to prepare and submit a document in this regard. The document should have been presented in April. However, Public Relations Officer of the Public Health Ministry, Mr. Terrence Esseboom, said that thus far a comprehensive document has not been presented to Minister Lawrence. He nevertheless admitted that a concise document speaking to measures to help address concerns relating to nursing examinations was handed over to the Ministry. There is more work to be done, Esseboom asserted.
During that meeting in March, which saw Minister Lawrence engaged in discussion with officials responsible for nurses training within the health system, as well as officials of the Ministry of Education, it was underscored that a deep diagnosis is needed for the overall nursing sector.
This was in light of the fact that the dismal failure of nursing students at the State Finals last year reflected that the situation has also had daunting financial implications for the Public Health Ministry.
The results of the examination are among the worst the system has seen and, based on their analysis, officials have been able to deduce that nursing students found Paper Two of the examination the most difficult.
This aspect of the examination required that the nursing students apply higher order reasoning such as explaining and evaluating. However, based on the results of the examination, the majority of the students were incapable of higher order reasoning. Students were however able to respond well to questions demanding a recall of content.
This state of affairs was outlined by Director of the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD), Ms Jennifer Cumberbatch, and her Chief Test Development Officer, Ms. Deon Farrell.
Based on the raw results of the 2016 State Final examinations seen by this publication, a mere 23 of the 179 candidates, who participated in the examination, were able to secure overall passes. Those examinations were held in December. The original examinations were administered in October and there were allegations that there was a leak of the examination, thus prompting the re-sit of the examination.
It was alleged that officials within the Guyana Nursing Council were responsible for the leak, and as such, the Guyana Police Force was called in to investigate this suspicion. There have reportedly been no arrests thus far in relation to this matter.
There have been other occasions that nursing students have performed poorly in recent years. In 2014, only 19 out of 267 students secured overall passes at the examination.
Given the shortcomings, Minister Lawrence said that she is desirous of seeing sweeping changes with an eye to reversing the unacceptable performances at the nurses’ exams.
However, there are tactics that have already been employed to help address the shortcomings in the system.
Among them have been reports that nursing students have not been getting enough supervision while engaged in practical situations on the wards. For this reason, a decision was made for Clinical Instructors to be brought on board at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation [GPHC]. The six Clinical Instructors in August of last year started to offer their services to the GPHC.
Among them is Nurse Jennifer Peterkin who was previously a Nursing Tutor. But as a Clinical Instructor she noted that her role now is to work along with the Ward Managers and the supervisors to ensure that things are done in the right way when it comes to training nurses. “We try to teach them the right things on the wards, but we are not here to take away the Ward Manager’s job. We are just working along with them and we observe when there are certain procedures being done. We ensure that there is enough equipment and the right equipment is in place. We ensure that the environment is right and ensure that they [nursing students] know how to speak to the patients,” explained Nurse Peterkin.
She, along with her fellow Clinical Instructors, is tasked with delivering in-service training as well.
Stressing the importance of Clinical Instructors, an official had previously explained that “Fixing the [nursing failure] problem doesn’t mean that we have to only look at the students, but we have to have faculties whose job is to look at students in clinical practice…the support of Clinical Instructors is very important. They [nursing students] spend more time there [in the hospital setting] than they spend in classrooms.”
But the official asserted, “failure is not failure just in the classroom, but the teaching institutions themselves…we have got to look at the shortcomings at all of the levels before we can begin to see a real change in the nursing students’ performances.”
Further still, it was proposed that in order to realise the needed change, moves to employ a Clinical Coordinator must also be seen as important, even as efforts are made to develop a course for Clinical Instructors to advance their efficiency.

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