Health Minister Dr Lackram Bodoe says he is urgently gathering the necessary information to shed light on why local nursing students are failing CXC’s Regional Examination for Nurse Registration (RENR).
On Tuesday, Trinidad and Tobago National Nursing Association president Idi Stuart and former nursing lecturer Maureen Giddings-Estwick revealed that students from this country have the worst grades in the region, with a 50 per cent failing grade overall. They were both speaking at the launch of the National Nurses Credit Union Co-operative Society Ltd.
Responding yesterday, Bodoe said the data is being sought from the office of the National Administrator of Nursing Services. He said once this is completed, a systematic review can be conducted.
“In so doing, and with a firm grasp of the fundamental issues at play, we can then engage with all the relevant stakeholders, including the TTNNA, to determine the most appropriate and sustainable course of action.”
However, the president of the Trinidad and Tobago Nursing Council, Corey George, believes the high failure rate among students is due to the curriculum not being aligned with the exam.
The council is the regulatory body that reviews and approves all the curricula in nursing and midwifery programmes in this country.
“The CXC RENR exams are based on domains and we found that our nursing curriculum in Trinidad and Tobago is not aligned to those domains,” he said.
During a Zoom interview with Guardian Media yesterday, George said they met with all heads of school nursing on December 13, 2024, to discuss why nursing students were failing.
In that meeting, the president said they presented the data from the last ten years (2014-2024), which he said showed a consistent decline.
“All schools of nursing were asked to review their curricula and come into alignment with the domains as set by the CXC RENR,” he shared.
George said that currently, both the University of the West Indies School of Nursing and the University of the Southern Caribbean were reviewing their curricula. However, he said there was a challenge with the COSTAATT School of Nursing, which had yet to review its curriculum or submit it to the council for review.
“The need for standardisation of nursing education is paramount for us in this jurisdiction,” he stated.
George said another challenge faced by nursing students was the inability to balance family life and jobs while enrolled in full-time programmes.
Meanwhile, Minister of Tertiary Education and Skills Training, Professor Prakash Persad, said he was in the process of obtaining statistics and information on the poor performance of nursing students to determine the root cause.
“It would not be wise to draw conclusions from correlations (for example, stipends to failure rates), the causes for the failure rates need to be determined and remedial measures need to be implemented if the problem is to be addressed,” he said.
