The Philippine government is to appeal a move by the US to ban some 17,000 nurses who passed the 2006 nursing examination amid allegations of mass cheating.
The United States Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS) issued the temporary ban this week insisting that Filipino nurses retake sections of the 2006 examination where mass cheating took place.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Friday ordered Labor Secretary Arturo Brion to appeal the decision.
The order comes after a nursing review centre disclosed it had leaked answers to some students who took the examinations.
The scandal rocked the country's medical profession and cast a shadow over the quality of its nurses, who are in high demand overseas, especially in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Some 42,000 students sat the nursing examination but only 17,000 passed.
Arroyo in a statement Saturday said she had ordered the appeal to "uphold the prestige of the country�s nursing profession and continue the deployment of Filipino nurses abroad."
She said the government has already provided financial assistance to the 2006 nurses who passed to retake the exams.
The president said all officials of the Professional Regulations Commission (PRC), which overseas the examinations, found involved in scandal will be dismissed and criminally charged.
"All officials involved in the nursing exam leakage should be dismissed without benefits and criminally charged," she stressed.
The CGFNS said on its website on Thursday that "Philippine nurses who were sworn in as licensed nurses in the Philippines following their passing the compromised licensure exam of June 2006 are not eligible for a VisaScreen Certificate."
The Philadelphia-based CGFNS said that it sent a fact-finding mission to the Philippines in September 2006 to investigate the reports of irregularities in the nursing licensure exam.
The CGFNS investigation concluded that "those who received their license as a result of passing the compromised June 2006 licensure examination raises significant questions about the accurate assessment of the competencies of many of those individuals."
All foreign nurses must have a CGFNS-issued VisaScreen Certificate before being allowed to work in the US.
"The integrity of foreign licensing systems ultimately affects the health and safety of patients in the United States, a primary consideration of CGFNS in its role of evaluating candidates under US immigration law," the CGFNS said.
taken from : http://sg.news.yahoo.com/070217/1/46rg8.html
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