Entrance exam recommended for prospective nursing students

High school graduates would have to take an examination before being allowed to enroll in a nursing course next year, if the government adopts a proposal of the Technical Committee on Nursing Education.

The planned aptitude test, which would be given by the Commission on Higher Education, would cover doctors and graduates of four-year college courses who intend to take up nursing.

The committee has recommended that the special program allowing doctors to get a nursing degree in two years be discontinued.

A National Nursing Admission Test will ensure the quality of nursing education, said Dr. Fely Marilyn Lorenzo, committee head and director of the University of the Philippines Institute of Health Policy and Development Studies.

The CHED en banc is set to approve their proposal, which could be implemented in time for the 2006-2007 school year, she added.

Lorenzo said the multi-agency Technical Committee on Nursing Education was formed to reverse the deteriorating quality of nursing education in the Philippines, brought about by the proliferation of nursing schools and the emigration of skilled and experienced professors and deans.

Records show that of some 26,000 examinees, only 49.9 percent passed the 2005 Nursing Board examinations, compared to the 61.34 percent passing rate of 10 years ago, she added.

Lorenzo said the program allowing doctors to get a nursing decree in two years provides "incomplete socialization" for physicians, making it difficult for them to adjust to a nurse’s life.

"We hope that this special program will cease to exist in 2006," she said. "We already conducted public hearings to rescind this program."

Lorenzo said some Filipino doctors who trained to become nurses have been turned away by hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom for practicing "medical management," instead of giving simple nursing care as they were hired to do.

Lorenzo said the Technical Committee on Nursing Education is now in the process of "harmonizing" the nursing curriculum, part of which is having a "globalized bench-mark curriculum."

"We want to compare our Philippine nursing curriculum with the curricula of the best and average schools in the first world," she said.

"We hope we can do it this year so this will provide a standard in nursing curricula here in the country." — Sheila Crisostomo