A request for class action was filed this Tuesday in Superior Court against the Order of Nurses of Quebec (OIIQ) and the numerous “flaws” in its admission exam. It is a nursing graduate who suffered three consecutive failures who is behind the initiative.
Jason Aurélien, a 24-year-old young man who obtained his college diploma in nursing in December 2021, claims to have taken the controversial exam three times in vain. Between March 2022 and 2023, he obtained marks of 53%, 32% and 50%, which each time constituted a failure.
More recently, last month, in September 2023, Mr. Aurélien again took an exam for which he is still awaiting a result. His lawyer, Me Fernand Bolton, maintains that “during the examination, his “body [le] coward, [sa] head spins, [son] body is heavy, [il est] tired and no longer able to concentrate.”
It is specified that Jason Aurélien’s multiple failures in the OIIQ exam caused him a “fear of not being able to obtain the title of nurse, a doubt about his personal and professional abilities”, shame, isolation, lower self-esteem and a feeling of helplessness.
He even “thought on several occasions of abandoning the profession”, we explain in the request, referring to the expenses related to obtaining his professional title. Without it, the young man receives the salary of a candidate for the practice of the nursing profession (CEPI), which is lower.
“Flaws and weaknesses”
All this comes a few months after an investigation by the Commissioner for Admission to the Professions, which revealed in May that the admission exam to the nursing profession contained several flaws. Nearly half of nursing students (48.6%) who took the exam for the first time last September failed the exam.
“Our investigation revealed that the Order’s examination contains flaws and weaknesses concerning its validity, its reliability and the determination of its passing score,” said at that time the commissioner for admission to professions, Mr.e André Gariépy.
According to a simulation carried out by his team, more than 500 students should have succeeded rather than failed in the September 2022 exam. “More than three-quarters of the students found that the questions, the scenarios and the answer choices did not were not clear,” Mr. Gariépy said in an interview.
The class action claims $30,000 for each person who registers in damages for harm resulting from the “inaction” of the OIIQ.
“There is a fault on the part of the OIIQ. We are still talking about a failure rate of 4% in 2020 to 55% in 2022. It is extremely high,” argued lawyer Me Fernand Bolton in interview with The Press. He maintains that the admissions commissioner’s reports are “unequivocal on several issues.”
All people “having failed the exam at least once […] between January 2021 and September 2023” will be able to register for the collective action, specified the cabinet of Me Belton Tuesday. It is possible to do this online. However, a judge must first authorize the class action to move forward.
Guardianship or not?
In recent days, the Interprofessional Health Federation of Quebec (FIQ) also mentioned that it was evaluating the legal remedies available to it, saying it was ready to claim millions. Last week, the National Federation of Teachers of Quebec (FNEEQ-CSN) for its part called for the Order to be placed under supervision, denouncing its “crass bad faith”.
This is a more recent report from Me André Gariépy, published at the beginning of October, which seems to have increased the pressure on this issue.
In this report, the commissioner ruled that the exam failure rate could not be explained by the pandemic, as the Order has already maintained. The failure rate stems “mainly from the flaws in the exam,” he said.
So far, the Office des professions du Québec has not imposed supervision on the OIIQ, but has imposed an independent specialist on it whose mandate is to ensure that the commissioner’s recommendations are applied. This specialist will also have to recalculate the results of the September 2022, March 2023 and September 2023 exams.
At the Order of Nurses, public relations advisor Marine Detraz confirmed Tuesday that her group received the request for collective action. “Our lawyers are looking into this request, but we cannot comment further on this file which is in the hands of the Court,” she limited herself to saying.
This spring, the Order announced its desire to set aside its own exam to adopt the American national test, the NCLEX-RN, used in several Canadian provinces. To date, however, the Professions Office has not given its agreement.
With Alice Girard-Bossé, The Press