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...