Filipino Nursing Herald

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.