US allows Pinoys to take nursing board exams in RP

Here’s good news for Filipino nurses.

The US has finally allowed Filipino and other foreign nurses wanting to work in America to take the mandatory national council licensure examination (NCLEX) in the Philippines.

In a statement posted on its website, the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing Inc. (NCSBN) announced that NCLEX testing will be conducted in Manila starting this August.

“The placement of a test site in the Philippines will allow for greater customer service to nurses without compromising the goal of safeguarding the public health, safety and welfare of patients in the US,” NCSBN said.

All security policies and procedures currently used to administer the NCLEX examination domestically would be fully implemented in the Philippines, which was chosen as a new site because of the government’s commitment to ensure a secure test center, NCSBN noted.

The first ever NCLEX was supposed to be conducted in the Philippines last year but was deferred after the news on the June 2006 nursing licensure examination controversy broke out.

Foreign nurses aspiring to work in the United States are required to apply to the board of nursing in the state or territory where they wish to be licensed before registering for the NCLEX examination.

Other international testing sites for NCLEX aside from the Philippines are London, England; Hong Kong; Sydney, Australia; Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai, India; Mexico City, Mexico; Taipei, Taiwan; and Chiyoda-ku and Yokohama, Japan.

As this developed, the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) yesterday reported that the results of the June 2007 nursing licensure examination would come out last week of August.

“Nursing examinees should not believe in text messages going around about the alleged stage of processing and the number of examinees who passed the examination,” PRC Chairman Leonor Rosero said.

Rosero pointed out that the release of the results of the examination would take longer than the past years considering the big volume of examinees who took the licensure tests.

Among the more than 78,580 examinees were 17,000 nurses who passed the leakage-tainted June 2006 board exams and who aspire to work in the United States.

Marco Sto. Tomas of the Board of Nursing (BON) assured that they are exerting efforts to release the results of the examination as soon as possible. “We do not have enough equipment to do the correction so there would be a little delay in the release of the results, but the correction process is proceeding smoothly,” Sto. Tomas said.