On May 9, the commissioner for admission to the profession, Me André Gariépy, released his report on the investigation into the low success rate for the September 2022 admission exam to the nursing profession. Since then, many things have been said about this review and our order. We wish today to express our vision of things.
The 83,000 nurses who are members of the Order of Nurses of Quebec (OIIQ) are dedicated to the health of their patients. As a professional order, we are of course witnesses to the efforts of elected officials and nurses to ensure quality care and find solutions to the current challenges of the health care system, which is particularly faced with situations of labor shortage.
The OIIQ would like to point out that its collaboration is guaranteed to the government. In the admission examination file, we are currently consulting with the Office des professions du Québec so that the support process for candidates for the examination is tightened with a significant contribution from clinical settings.
The examination for admission to the nursing profession is a measuring instrument that is not intended to assess the learning achieved in a training course, but rather to determine the ability to practice the contemporary nursing profession independently and safely. Because, let’s remember, as part of its important mission to protect the public, our order ensures that all of its members provide services that meet the standards of quality and integrity of the profession.
The exam is composed of clinical situations that reflect the risk-of-harm interventions and decisions that a new nurse must make. The clinical situations and the resulting questions are developed by a group made up of CEGEP and university teachers as well as nurses working in the clinic. The current exam has been administered since 2018.
As of 2018, the exam pass rate after three attempts is 96%. Another point to remember: we are the only professional order that issues the same permit to practice for two different training paths.
It is important to mention that the current exam has not undergone any changes since. What had changed, however, was the more difficult access to preparatory support for candidates for the September 2022 exam during their internships during the pandemic.
All of the Order’s activities are guided by the governance values of trust, caring, respect and fairness. It is with this in mind that the Commissioner shared with us, last March, the content of his forthcoming report. We moved quickly to adopt his recommendations. For the benefit of candidates for the practice of the profession, we have applied certain relaxations in order to promote their success:
• We allowed candidates to postpone their exam scheduled for March 2023 if they felt unable to take it or wished to wait for the conclusion of the commissioner’s investigation;
• We have communicated with all those concerned in order to restore their right to practice as candidates for the practice of the profession in the event of failure or delays in passing the exam.
One of the measures proposed by the commissioner is to consider using another examination relevant to the nursing profession. The OIIQ thus announced, on May 11, its intention to have recourse to the examination of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCLEX-RN), already used by all regulatory agencies in the United States and Canada.
This is not a university-level exam. In existence since 1994, it has been submitted to more than six million people, making it a proven measurement tool. A large pool of international experts, made up of thousands of nurses from healthcare settings and teaching establishments, worked on its development. Our experts from the OIIQ will join this pool.
Nurses are part of the solutions. They are one of the keys to decongestion of hospitals, optimization of the first line and effective deployment of home care. We have said it over and over again, Quebec needs more nurse clinicians and specialized nurse practitioners. Quebecers can count on our order to ensure the entry level skills of our nurses.