Wednesday, August 29, 2007 Wenceslao: Board exam passers By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
I received a text message Monday from a mother obviously excited that her son passed the recent nursing licensure exams. I am referring to my former high school classmate in Southwestern University, Letty Sindo-Plaza, who is with the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Her son Rex Carlo is now a nurse and that’s something to be proud of.
Going to the office hours later, I overheard two of my fellow multicab passengers talking about the coming oath taking for nurses and the prospects of working. I reckoned that they were graduates of the Sacred Heart college in Talisay; they made that apparent when we passed by the campus in Lawaan 1. Both were clearly nurse board passers.
Judging from the stir created by the release by the Professional Regulation Commission of the June 2007 licensure exams for nurses, I say the takers and the passers in Cebu must have been a multitude. A total of 64,909 nursing graduates in the country took the board exams and only 31,275 of them passed. I don’t have the data for Cebu.
Anyway, nine graduates from five Cebu nursing schools managed to land in the Top 10. Velez College had three, Southwestern University and University of Cebu had two each and Cebu Normal University and the Cebu City Medical Center College of Nursing had one each. That spoke well of the quality of nursing education offered here.
Of course, having topnotchers is only part of the story. It would be interesting to find out the passing percentage in all Cebu schools offering nursing courses. This is necessary considering that many capitalists have jumped into the bandwagon, nursing having become the favored course for those dreaming of earning good pay abroad.
Meanwhile, there should no longer be questions about the integrity of this year’s exams after the cheating controversy in 2006. Among Cebu’s topnotchers, one was even a retaker, choosing to retake the entire exams. A total of 13,338 nurses from last year’s batch nationwide retook Tests 3 and 4 two months ago and more than two thirds passed.
Cheating is actually a cycle, meaning it won’t be totally eradicated given the profit motive of nursing schools and the selfishness of some people. Immediately after cheating is exposed in an examination year, the natural reaction is for the cheaters to back off in the next board exams. But as years pass, cheaters eventually reacquire the daring.
In the meantime, board passers and their parents should be warned that things do not change for the better in a snap. Getting a license as a nurse may be one step closer to realizing the dream of the good life. But there’s still much work ahead. The reality is that not all nurses make it big, the rest are either lowly paid or fail to land nursing jobs.
But the so-called brain drain does not worry me at all. In the end, everything would end up like water that stabilizes after finding its own level. For every nurse that gets jobs abroad there will always be many that remain. Besides, the way we are churning out nurses every year, I doubt if local hospitals will ever get empty soon.
I still have high hopes for the new nurses, most of whom will most likely stay here for a few years while waiting for job opportunities abroad. What they lack in experience they make up in idealism and vigor.
Congratulations, then, to our new nurses, and may they not forget the pledge named after a legend: Florence Nightingale.
