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For the past 20 years, The Filipino Express has provided the Filipino American community the best news, arts and entertainment coverage from around the United States and the Philippines.
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MANILA -- The country has lost its bid to become an accredited venue for the American licensure exams for foreign nurses due to an alleged test leakage in the 2006 local nursing board exams.
Dante Ang, chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO), said he had received information that the country’s application to be included in the list of international testing centers of the US National Commission on Licensure Examination (NCLEX) has been put on hold.
“We will not be included in the agenda of the [National Council of State Boards of Nursing] (NCSBN) to be considered as a testing site,” Ang said.
“Na-defer tayo. (We were deferred.) We will not be in the agenda in the near future,” he added.
Ang said several NCSBN officials visited the Philippines last March to discuss the country’s bid to become an accredited international venue for the US nursing licensure exam. He said at least 83 percent of NCLEX examinees in international testing centers, particularly in Hong Kong, Guam and Saipan, are Filipinos.
He said that the country “had already reached third base” to hold the NCLEX exam here before reports of the local nursing board exam leakage broke out. He added that NCSBN officials are closely monitoring the developments of the investigation on the test leakage.
“We need to be very open about this investigation. We need to uphold our dignity, uphold our honor and prosecute the guilty parties,” he said.
He added that the CFO and other government agencies will work to revive the country’s bid as a foreign testing center for NCLEX in future NCSBN meetings.
He said the NCSBN has no set timetable on when it approves applications for foreign testing centers.
A Professional Regulation Commission report earlier said a Philippine Nursing Association official paid P7 million to get a leakage from members of the PRC Board of Nursing (BON) who drafted the nursing board exams. The PRC report said the PNA official got questions and answers from Tests 3 and 5 of the board exams.
PNA president George Cordero, the official implicated in the PRC report, resigned last week after the Senate started investigating the scandal.
Nursing board members including two officials who allegedly leaked the test questions and answers have also offered to resign but were denied.
Ang said the government should immediately accept the resignations of the officials.
He also called for a review of the requirements for PNA officials and BON members. He said faculty members of colleges of nursing or owners of review centers should not sit as PNA or BON officials because of conflict of interest.
Ang said he has received news that the state of Arkansas will not accept 2006 nursing board passers because of questions of competence as a result of the test leakage.
He said government agencies tasked to monitor the country’s bid to hold NCLEX exams locally will petition the Court of Appeals to invalidate the oath-taking of nurses last week and impose a mandatory retake of tests 3 and 5 of the board exams.
Members of the task force include CFO, PRC, National Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Department of Foreign Afairs and the Philippine National Police.
Ang said the task force is backing a petition filed by the UST College of Nursing Faculty Association, League of Concerned Nurses and Binuklod na Samahan ng Student Nurses to invalidate the oath-taking and order the mandatory retaking of two exams in the 2006 nursing board.
Ang said the task force will draft a resolution and submit it to the Court of Appeals this week.
“I would like to apologize to those who already took their oaths and those who didn’t cheat but we think this is the only way to remove the taint (of the leakage) in their marks,” he said.
He said a PRC resolution invalidating two portions of the exams that were allegedly leaked lowers the standards for new nurses. (MNS)
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MANILA -- A US-based healthcare company expressed its willingness to hire all the 17,000 nurses who passed the Nursing Licensure Examination given in June, despite the ongoing testing scandal.
Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) Commissioner Atty. Renato Valdecantos said the announcement made by the owners of California-based GSN Inc. about the need for new nurses has “lifted the morale of the board exam passers tremendously.”
“This year’s board passers have been getting negative publicity. Their spirits are dampened. But it’s good that GSN made the announcement,” Valdecantos said in a Manila Bulletin report.
GSN Inc. president Grace Navae and husband David Hoff surprised the hundreds of students who were chanting “No Retake” when they declared their eagerness to hire the nurses.
“Whatever is going on locally, that will have no influence in you getting work in the United States,” Navae said. “All 17,000 nurses are welcome in the US. All are available to be hired. You went through your four-year training, therefore, you should be allowed to practice your profession,” Hoff told the new nurses.
“If you come to the US, you will be required to go through several processes to determine your competency... so even if you’re the Top 1 board passer or not, it doesn’t really matter,” he explained.
Laurence Ignacio of Fatima College University in Valenzuela said “Nabuhayan kami ng loob. Puro negative na lang kasi naririnig namin. Nagutom kami sa balita na pabor naman sa amin.”
Antoinette De Castro of Perpetual Help College Manila echoed a similar point adding “we are thankful that we heard the side of the employers. Alam namin na may future din kami sa States.”
Earlier, a group of students and teachers from the University of Sto. Tomas and the Far Eastern University (FEU) sought from the Court of Appeals (CA) to restrain the oath-taking of examinees who allegedly benefited from the reported leakage.
Meanwhile, Malacańang has refused to intervene in the scandal, saying PRC has the situation under control.
Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said the alleged test leak was an “isolated case” and should not put to shame the pool of highly-skilled Filipino nurses here and abroad.
“This should not be cause for any stigma on our nurses or other professionals who remain to be among the best in the world,” he said in a statement.
Bunye however said the culprits must be charged and tried and those found guilty punished to the full extent of the law.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The number of Filipinos overstaying in the United States appears to have shrunk. The Philippines, which ranked as the fourth leading source of illegal immigrants in 2000 after Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, has dropped to seventh place at the start of this year, according to US statistics.
About 215,000 undocumented Filipino immigrants, commonly referred to as TNTs (the Filipino acronym for “tago nang tago” or constantly in hiding), were estimated to be living in the US as of Jan. 1, 2006, the Philippine Star reported.
This new data was coontained in a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics released on Friday, August 18.
Five years ago, there were an estimated 200,000 undocumented Filipinos in the US.
Filipinos made up two percent of an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US at the start of 2006.
About 3.1 million of all unauthorized residents had come to live in the US in 2000 or later. One million entered the US in 2003 or 2004, while 2.1 million arrived during 2000 through 2002, the office said.
Mexicans made up more than half of the illegal aliens as of the start of this year at nearly six million, followed by Salvadorans (470,000), Guatemalans (370,000), Indians (280,000) and Chinese (230,000).
The office estimated there were 210,000 undocumented Filipinos in January 2005 and that the number grew at a slow rate of two percent a year.
There were also an estimated 210,000 illegal Koreans in January 2005, but their six percent average growth rate a year placed them ahead of the Filipinos in the overall rankings.
The report said illegal aliens were primarily attracted to California which drew in 2.8 million of them, Texas (1.4 million), Florida (850,000), New York (560,000), Illinois (520,000), Arizona (480,000), Georgia (470,000), New Jersey (380,000), North Carolina (360,000) and Nevada (240,000).
The report said estimating the size of illegal aliens living in the US was challenging because of data limitations.
Unauthorized immigrant population must be estimated by making certain assumptions and by combining data that measure events with those that measure populations, it said.
The US census of 2000 estimated there were about 1.9 million Filipinos living in the country — 32 percent of them US citizens by birth, 41 percent naturalized US citizens, and 26 percent permanent residents, or so-called green card holders.
Latest estimates put this number at between 2.1 million and 2.3 million.
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