Pappy show at Nursing School

01.FEB.11

Editor: I am writing to state my disgust about the School of Nursing here. It is so under staffed that students are not getting the attention they need, and that it is so politically motivated.{{more}}

The other thing is that if you are a student you are treated with little respect and belittled, it is so because they fail you at your exams, especially practicals. So you move about afraid to question things.

Students reached so far as the last year of the programme, preparing to write the regional exams, and then these examiners decide to fail you at a course. Yes they do give another chance to resit this exam once, but hey, once their minds are made up about you that is it.

The dean and other instructors will use the excuse and say that they have no hands on patient care, but during the student tenure there, they were never told that until results are in. Every time a student is rotated to a new ward area, they are evaluated, and these same said students will have a good, or let’s say not a bad evaluation. Another thing is, while being taught how to do a procedure, almost each instructor has a different version as to how it is performed.

This often leaves students confused, and instead of students learning the correct way, what happens is that they would try their best to know the standard of the examiner, to perform the procedure.

Usually for an exam you are given two instructors during an exam, and then conflict begins when these instructors are different. The students are then left to fail, because during exams time, no one will say that’s the way the students were taught, or that is how these procedures are presented on the ward areas.

What really baffles me is that having almost completed three years, regional exams around the corner, students are then denied. The government would have given these students scholarship, a stipend every month. Is that the government has much resources available to do this. We all know that the majority of students having completing the program would not be appointed, so what is the reason behind of it. Why do they wait until a person would have come so far, and then be dismissed?

All these nurses talk about is professionalism, and to them professionalism means, having your cap pinned on your head in a certain way, wearing a stockings. They are not concerned with honesty and integrity and fairness and the quality of a person work. We often hear the public comments about nurses behavior and attitudes and I must say it all starts with the School of Nursing, in which, you are not evaluated according to your work, but to who you know at the top. I heard it said, and it breaks my heart to say it, and it was a top official here who said it, “If you think women are mean to each other, you should try nurses”. When asked what that means, they said, “Let a nurse come up for a promotion and then you will start to hear all negative comments about that person that was never launched before, just to keep that person down. Same thing applies to the students, when they want to get rid of you, they will bring all sort of things against you that you never knew existed before.

The government boasts about taking in large number of young people to train in nursing, to give them a skill, an opportunity to go elsewhere and better them selves; but they fail to tell the public that these large numbers that they take in, half of them do not graduate, are not given a fair chance to complete the program. We saw and know that the school is under staffed, yet we saw two qualified lecturers transferred from the school, and yes we heard their rationale and justification about these lecturers, for instance, one of them put obeah in the Dean’s office, but everyone knows at the time, it was all politically motivated.

The School of Nursing has moved from the Ministry of Health, and is now placed under the Ministry of Education. I therefore ask the question, are they part of the education revolution that our present government so kindly boast about? If so why are these students not given the opportunity of completing their education?

Also in other tertiary and even secondary institutions we have teenage pregnancies taking place, but at the School of Nursing this is highly punishable as the student is on a three year scholarship. The students are not even given the opportunity to catch up on classes on their own, so that they could finish the course in time, they are told that they will be demoted, their stipend cut and then threatened to be sent home when their three years are up.

Student Nurse