Filipino Nursing Herald

The anxiety of waiting for the results of a major test, like the June 2007 Philippine Nurse Licensure exam, builds up when you expect that an announcement would come out soon. As the days draw nearer to a target date or a day that you'd expect the results to be published, the tension gradually intensifies. Some people cope adequately, while others lose sleep, lose appetite, and even, sometimes, lose their mind. (I'm exaggerating.) The Professional Regulatory Commission (PRC), which administers the nursing licensure test, earlier said results for the June 2007 board exams would be available by the middle of August. I assume that's from Aug. 15 onwards, or about two months after the exams were conducted in various parts of the country. Throughout the history of PRC, they've been terrible at calculations and predictions. Of course, you have to marvel at their efficiency and speed when processing license tests for master plumbers, foresters, and certified mill foremen. But ...

Filipina nurse Lily Maniquiz Lara has been awarded the 2006 Best Nurse Leader in a search conducted by Advance, a US-based nursing publication. Lara was cited primarily for her leadership in the development and implementation of a successful program that reduced patient falls by as much as 80% in the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System's Nursing Home Care Unit 213-2, among her other accomplishments. The Philippine Nurses Association-America in Southern California had earlier awarded Lara with the Excellence in Nursing Management and she had been previously awarded the Excellence in Nursing Innovation in 2004. Advance also cited Lara's effective management style, which helped her get a 95% staff satisfaction mark in a survey conducted by the publication. "When it comes to pulling people together to get the job done, Lara relies on her innate ability to connect with a wide variety of personalities to create trusting relationships," Advance writer Luke Cowles wrote...

If you haven't decided yet on which nursing specialty you want to go into or if you're tired of the humdrum of the medical-surgical floor, here's an emerging nursing specialty that you might want to check out. It's called "blackbelt nursing"--where the first intervention for an aggressive or violent client is to deliver a karate chop as a sedative. I'm just kidding, of course. But you never know how things progress in the future. Check out this story from news.com.au: Docs, nurses take self-defense

More than a dozen Filipino senior carers in Cambridge in the UK may have to leave the country after the local government has refused to renew their work permits. The refusal comes after the removal of senior carers off the national shortage jobs list. Many of the Filipinos facing deportation have lived in Cambridge for four years. The decision has been appealed, with city MP David Howarth taking on their case.

Canadian authorities have begun investigations of a security breach in its own nursing licensure exam in June. Questions that were part of the licensure test were leaked days before the exam was conducted, according to a report by thestar.com. Officials of the Canadian Nursing Association said only questions in the short-answer part (fill-in-the-blank) were compromised. These short-answer questions comprise 15% of the entire test, while multiple choice questions make up the rest of the day-long exam, which had 250 questions in all. Some 5,300 candidates took the nursing test, which is a requirement for licensure in Canada. **** I'm eagerly awaiting how CGFNS will react to this scandal, which strikes so much resemblance to the Philippines' own leakage controversy. Canadian authorities contend that those who passed the exam are qualified nurses, despite being scored based only on the multiple-choice portion of the test, a strategy which our own PRC employed--scoring candidates b...

A Filipino nurse in the United Kingdom got a reprieve from the British government, which had earlier wanted to kick him out for missing a deadline for the filling of an immigration form. Aldrin Quibuyen, a nurse who works at Caeffair Nursing Home in Llanelli, was allowed to stay in the country after being granted a reprieve by House of Commons, Immigration Minister Liam Byrne. Quibuyen has been in the UK since 2003, while his wife and son Buzz joined him in 2004. They have a daughter, Phebe, who was born in the UK.

I didn't know Labor Secretary Arturo Brion could crack a joke, not until I read the news from gmanews.tv about his proposal to give practical nursing licenses to those who would fail the recent June 2007 nursing licensure exams. If I were a practical nurse, I'd be insulted. At least in the US, they have separate exams for nurses and practical nurses. I hope Brion is not even half-serious about his proposal to turn the practical nursing profession into a basketcase of nurse flunkers. In the first place, what is Brion thinking? I suppose he wants to make practical nurses out of all flunkers, not just those who are with the June 2006 batch who re-took the exams, since he says only half of the 78,000 who sat for the test are expected to make the cut. The June 2006 batch have a different set of hurdles that they should overcome, but first-timers and non-June 2006 examinees don't need Brion's condescension. Whether or not a nursing applicant from the Philippines gets a loca...

Headhunters from Canada have reportedly started luring Filipino nurses away from Ireland, where the government refuses to give citizenship status to Filipino immigrants, even to those who have stayed there for over seven years. In the past few weeks, Canadian recruiters have gone on a massive recruitment drive to get as many as 250 Filipino nurses to move to Alberta, where green cards and better wages await them. There are about 10,000 Filipino nurses in Ireland and only a few have been granted citizenship. The Irish government does not recognize educational credentials of the spouses of Filipino nurses and Filipinos pay higher school fees for their children because, without citizenship, they're classified as international students.

The New York Times and Vault.com offer an excellent collection of anecdotal articles about what goes on in a typical day for various types of jobs in the US. So, while waiting for a relief from the retrogression blues, let's take a peek into a typical day of a medical-surgical nurse in the US. Dan Bratton, a registered nurse who works on the medical-surgical floor of the Good Samaritan General Hospital in New York, lets us in on a typical day for him at the hospital. Read about Bratton's day here .

Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius (Photo from Wikipedia ) The African Press Agency reports that Mauritius --an island nation off the coast of Africa in the southwest Indian Ocean, about 900 kilometers east of Madagascar--may open its doors to foreign nurses. The island state has been losing nurses to France, which has its own nursing shortage of about 25,000 positions. Mauritians are fluent in French and English is taught in schools, that's why they're being recruited to France.

The US Senate yesterday voted down a proposal by Senator John Cornyn to bring in an amendment (SA 2337) to H.R. 2669 that would have brought temporary relief to the retrogression. The motion fell 55-40, with 5 abstaining from the vote. Click here to see who voted against the proposal. ( The Nays killed the motion. )

Businessweek today reports that the US Congress is contemplating a possible legislation that would provide additional green cards for skilled workers. Representative Zoe Lofgren, who serves as the chairman of the House subcommittee on immigration, confirmed that there are informal discussions going on among congressmen regarding the increase in yearly green card allocations by at least 100,000. Recent revelations that the US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has not been able to issue all of the alloted visas for the past years because it lacked the resources to process all of the applications have prompted congressmen to initiate the discussions. The USCIS recently admitted that 10,000 of the 140,000 green cards that were allocated last year were never given out. Without new legislation, these visas can not be issued anymore. Over the last 10 years, it is estimated that as many as 170,000 green cards have been unused. The current discussions in Congress are focused on po...

The U.S. News & World Report has announced the results of its annual survey of the Best Hospitals in the U.S. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore has again come up on top, followed by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. The survey ranks the best places to seek medical care, not the best places to work for as a nurse, but often most of the top hospitals also offer superb nursing opportunities. After you look up the survey, check out this interesting article, " Your New Best Friends, the Nurses ", as well.

The big news today is that the US Department of State has allowed the filing of Adjustment of Status (I-485) until August 17. It rescinded the July 2 Visa Bulletin which took back an earlier announcement that employment-based visas would be available by July. Applicants whose I-140s are current and are in the US for at least three months may already file for AOS until the cut-off date. The August Visa bulletin , however, shows that all employment-based visas would be unavailable and this is expected until October, which is the start of the agency's fiscal year.

New Zealand is a beautiful country. Its breathtaking landscape and unpolluted air are only a few of the things to love about this country. I've thought about moving to New Zealand even before I took up nursing and now that I have a higher chance of getting into the country with a nursing degree, the temptation is more intense, especially since there's so much uncertainty regarding the US nursing industry right now. So, when I was asked few days ago what I think about moving to New Zealand, I already had a ready answer. If you want to take out the uncertainty and want to move out in a definite time, New Zealand looks very promising compared to the US, where there's no telling when the retrogression will end. Applications for NZ are pretty much very straightforward--just get all the paperwork done and you've got high chances of landing a nursing job there, especially if you already have some work experience tucked under your belt. (Although experience is not required b...

I doubt if robots would ever perform patient rounds for nurses, just like what they're doing for some doctors right now. A more intriguing question would be: would doctors be able to use robots to see patients when they're far away if there were no nurses at the bedside to carry out their orders? What do you think? (Photo is by the Associated Press)

An NCLEX-RN test center is finally here in Manila. Although the center officially opens on August 23, when the first NCLEX exam in the Philippines will be conducted, applicants may now schedule their test date. Two days ago, all the exam slots in the Hong Kong test center from July to October were all booked, but today, numerous slots have opened from late July onwards. It was about time that a Manila test center opened, for such a long time Filipinos have had tremendous difficulty scheduling test dates there, so many had to resort to extreme measures such as taking the NCLEX in Saipan, Taiwan, South Korea, and even Japan. More importantly, the opening of the Manila test center is a great financial relief to many Filipino nurses who don't have the resources to pay for plane fare, food, and hotel accommodations outside the country. The Manila test center won't be conducting exams until August 23, but if you want to know where it's located so you can scout transportation rout...

Pearson Vue today will begin scheduling services for the NCLEX-RN exam in its Manila testing center. Here's the contact information for the Manila center: Pearson Professional Centers-Manila, Philippines Telephone: +63 2 887 2198 Address: 27th Floor, Trident Tower 312 Senator Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City, Manila The number listed above has now been updated and is the official number of the Pearson office in Manila. If you can't reach this number, you may try other Pearson Vue hotlines: * The Asia-Pacific call center (based in Australia): +612-94785400 * You may try this number as well: 1280061294785400 (The prefix 1 and 2 might be for int'l dialing, so you can replace it with your use your provider's int'l dialing instructions, for ex. +1 or +001, etc.) * You can also try this: 1800-1110-0796 loc 3 (Contributed by Kokeshi) * Chicago, Illinois office: 312-525-3667 or 312-525-3600 (submitted by a reader) You can see a map of the Pearson Vue testing...

While waiting out the retrogression, now is the best time to complete all your documents, get the NCLEX done (if you haven't done so), and perhaps earn some work experience (if you're not employed yet). Although not all employers in the U.S. require experience, it'll be good to boost your own confidence especially if you're a young fresh graduate. Don't let the retrogression get you down, the worldwide nursing shortage won't be gone in a day. Read this story , for instance, of a hospital in Southwest Florida which is contemplating international recruitment efforts. An excerpt from the article, reads: International recruitment . Lee Memorial brought in 54 nurses from India who were under contract with Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center and Gulf Coast Hospital before Lee Memorial purchased those two facilities. If the nurses work out — and by all appearances they are — Lee Memorial might again look overseas for staff. Other data to think about: Hospitals ar...

The news today about the opening of the NCLEX testing center in Manila is the best news we've received in a long time. The NCSBN, in a press release, said the Manila center will begin accepting calls on Friday, July 13, NCLEX applicants who already have their ATT can start scheduling their exam dates this Friday, but actual exams will only begin on Aug. 23. I've e-mailed NCSBN to ask additional details about the Manila test center, hopefully they'll reply soon. Except for the start of scheduling and exam administration, the NCSBN press release contained little else. There were no details about the location of the testing center and the number of examinees it can accommodate in a day. The testing center will be operated by the NCSBN's test service partner Pearson Vue. NCSBN said the center will have the same security systems as in other NCLEX testing centers. In the past, there were reports that the NCLEX testing center would be located in the Enterprise Building in Maka...

The National Council of State Boards of Nursing, Inc. (NCSBN) will begin NCLEX testing in Manila at the international Pearson Professional Center on Aug. 23, 2007. Scheduling for examination appointments will begin on July 13, 2007. Read the full story here .

This is a shoutout for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. On Tuesday, Ban called on both rich and poor countries to act urgently on pressing problems related to migration. The UN's top official told some 600 delegates at an international migration conference in Brussels to address growing issues such abuse and discrimation of migrants. He also asked richer nations--particularly, Japan, the U.S. and member-nations of the European Union--to create policies that are friendlier to migration, especially of people trying to escape poverty in Africa and Asia. Ban has just become migration's biggest advocate. I'd vote him as President anywhere anytime. The Brussels conference is the first in informal conferences designed to discuss the migration phenomenon. The next conference is planned next year, right here in Manila.

A new report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers says the U.S. medical workforce system needs resuscitative care. It says that even though there are more doctors and nurses today than ever before, they are not being trained, distributed or deployed efficiently. A huge decline in the number of nurses will begin in less than three years but hospital employers are still in denial about just bad nurses feel about their work conditions. Read the official media release on the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report here .

I was asked a few days ago about the validity of English exam scores for Visascreen purposes. Someone had earlier claimed in a post at an Internet forum for nurses that English scores were valid up to five years if you submit it already to CGFNS. All of the information posted at the CGFNS Web site said English scores were only valid for two years, so I e-mailed CGFNS to verify if the new information was accurate. As it turned out, the new information is totally wrong. English scores were only valid for a maximum of two years, regardless of the date you file your Visascreen application. So, for example, if your IELTS scores were expiring on Aug., and your NCLEX exam is on Oct., even if you file your Visascreen application before Aug., your English scores would still become invalid and you'll have to retake the IELTS again. Here's the e-mailed response of CGFNS: Thank you for your inquiry. If an applicant's English exam expires before he takes the NCLEX exam, he will need to ...

We all know how the U.S. Senate shot down a proposed immigration reform bill that sought to establish a guest-worker program, not to mention legal status for 12 million illegal immigrants in the country. However, I'm sure not everyone knows that the American Hospital Association (AHA) was actually against the immigration proposal. Although this may be old news for some and perhaps, now immaterial because of the failure of the immigration bill, I'm still posting a link here to the article on AHA's position for the curious.

Earlier this year, the Norwegian government said it was contemplating the recruitment of foreign-educated nurses to fill its own nursing shortage, which is expected to reach as large as 100,000 positions in the next few decades. The plan, however, is being blocked by the Norwegian Nurses Association. Since this story came out in the Norway Post, I haven't seen any other update anywhere on the Internet. If you find any additional news on this, please let us know, so we can share it to everyone.

In case you're sending documents to Continental Testing Services, the third party service provider hired by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation to handle registration applications, you can use a different mailing address than the usual P.O. Box number they use. Fedex doesn't send to P.O. Box numbers that's why you might need a different mailing address. You can use this instead: Continental Testing Services, Inc 547 S. LaGrange Road LaGrange, Illinois 60525

This September, Filipino-American Zenei Triunfo Cortez , will officially join three other women on the President’s Council of the California Nurses Association, and become the first Filipino-American to lead the largest union of nurses in the U.S. Cortez was 19 when she migrated with her family to the U.S. in 1974. With over 25 years experience as a nurse, Cortez will spearhead advocacy efforts for over 75,000 registered nurses in California, where nurses recruited from the Philippines have become major contributors to U.S. healthcare.

I've gotten good feedback aboout nursing in France, but to be able to qualify for a nursing license, you'd have to speak fluent French first. I had two semesters of French back in college in UP (my first course was Journalism in Diliman), but I can't speak one complete sentence in French anymore. Actually, I had two semesters of French (10 and 11) and two semesters of Spanish (1 and 2), but the only words I remember are Lo siento and Désolé and I can't even tell which is French and which is Spanish! I'll post more about nursing in France later.

Saudi's Ministry of Health and Hospital Operations is recruiting up to 5,000 nurses from the Philippines, according to the Philippine Information Agency. It seems that a recruitment drive in Mindanao by the Saudi government through local partner firms failed to attract enough nurses, that's why they're now recruiting from Manila. Unfortunately for male nurses, Saudi is specifically looking for female nurses only.

A global shortage of nurses is also taking its toll in the United Arab Emirates, reports the Dubai-based online tabloid Xpress. This rich Arab state has had difficulties retaining its nurses, of whom 91% were recruited either from the Philippines or India, because many nursing professionals use their experience in the UAE as leverage to get more lucrative jobs in the UK, US or Australia. Training UAE nationals to become nurses does not look very promising because nursing requires direct patient contact and working in shifts, which clash with local culture and traditions, according to a hospital recruiter in the country. The average monthly salary of nurses in Dubai ranges from Dh2,000 and Dh9,000. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, nurses' salaries are between 12,000 and 18,000 Saudi riyals (Dh11,750-Dh17,600). Check US nursing salaries here .

Here's an interesting article about an ongoing issue in Canada, where doctors are demanding the return of a special team of nurses who solely perform venipuncture or IV insertions on patients. Based on the story, the Vancouver Island Health Authority has pulled out the IV insertion team that works night shifts, but a group of doctors--anesthesiologists, in particular--and nurses are clamoring for the return of this team. The doctors said they've seen too many patients who've been bruised and bloodied from missed IV insertion attempts. A more interesting link I found, however, was a testimonial from an American nurse who says Filipino nurses are particularly good at this skill.

About two weeks ago, I had trouble running the original CD that came with the latest edition of the Saunders Q & A Review for the NCLEX-RN Examination Edition 3 . The problem didn't seem to come from the CD itself, instead, there was an issue with a library file that came with Windows that was incompatible with the CD application. Whenever I attempted to install the CD, an error message came up that says connection to the data had failed and it kept asking for the CD, which was already inserted into the CD slot. So, I googled to see if anybody else had the same issue and if they had the solution. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any so I had to e-mail Elsevier about it. To my surprise, I got a very prompt answer from them. Keith, one of their technical support agents, was very helpful and he responded quickly to my questions. To fix the bug, a library file needs to be copied to the Window/systems32 folder. Apparently, in some Windows installations, the latest version of the m...

Filipino nurses working in Duke University Health System in North Carolina stand to get $5,000 just by referring another nurse to work at the facility. Read the story here .

Employment-based visas in the U.S. are again retrogressed, according to the revised July Visa Bulletin released by the Citizenship and Immigration Services Offices (USCIS) today. The USCIS allocated some 60,000 new employment visas this past month just to be able to clear its backlog but the allocations have all been exhausted and any new applications would not be accepted until October 1, the start of the USCIS' 2008 fiscal year. Read the official announcement here and here.

This just in from ABS-CBN Interactive : At least nine US states are now "eagerly recruiting" Filipino nurses and other health professionals, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines said. Former senator and TUCP general secretary Ernesto Herrera identified the nine US states as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey. 'Over 50 percent of 77.5 million American baby boomers—those born between 1946 to 1964—live in these nine states. This is why these states need health professionals by the thousands,' Herrera said. I suppose nobody told Herrera about the retrogression, but this info is good to know, at least we know where the opportunities are. Read the rest of the story here .

ABS-CBN's Bandila reports that work opportunities for nurses are currently available in Canada, Spain, Australia at New Zealand. We've earlier blogged about opportunities in New Zealand and Australia, but it's also good news to hear about new opportunities for Filipino workers in Canada and Spain. Canada is busy preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics, that's why they're inviting seasonal workers to help build the infrastructure needed for the Games. Aside from construction workers (heavy equipment operators, welders, painters, etc.), they're also looking for cooks, hotel workers, truck drivers and even people who'd work restaurants and fast food chains. Around 600 nurses are needed in the city of Saskatchewan in Canada. You can get more information on beautiful Saskatchewan here . Aside from caregivers, nurses and engineers are also being invited to apply for jobs in Spain, the Philippines' former colonial master. To qualify for a job in Spain, applican...

Michael Moore's latest documentary, "Sicko" has begun showing in U.S. theaters and it's been fueling debates about the country's healthcare policies. In a letter posted by Moore on his Web site, he says that the movie is on track to have the second largest opening weekend for a documentary in the history of the movies! ("Fahrenheit 9/11" was first.) The film, which delves primarily on how terrible the U.S. government has handled healthcare for Americans, hopes to effect change in the healthcare industry. Supporters of the movie are batting for a couple of pending bills in the U.S. Congress that seek to improve America's current healthcare situation, and we're hoping that somewhere in that hoolabaloo, a legislation allowing the continued entry of foreign-educated nurses would also surface. More articles on this topic: 'Sicko' takes in $4.5M million in weekend debut "Sicko" target="_New" Energizes Health Care Debate ...

Filipinos working overseas, including nurses, sent home a total of $1.2 billion in remittances in April this year alone. That's 32.6% higher compared to the same period last year. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas says that overseas Filipino workers have already sent a total of $4.7 billion in the first four months of 2007, or more than 26.1% compared to the same period last year. The government is expecting over $13.5 billion in remittances for the entire year, up from the 2006 total of $12.8 billion. Of the eight million overseas workers, there's an estimated 163,756 Filipino nurses working in various countries all over the world.

The Economic Times of India reports that the deployment to Kuwait of hundreds of nurses from the Philippines and India is being delayed by red tape. Both Philippine and Indian embassies in the Arabian state have so far failed to certify the professional credentials submitted by the nurses recruited to work in Kuwaiti government hospitals, the report said.