Thunder Bay hospital sees more nursing grads fail final exam

Officials with the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre say they've had to change the way they hire graduating nursing students, who are looking for summer employment, this year.

The hospital covers staff nurses' vacations by hiring new graduates, conditional on passingthe nursing registration exam.

This year, however, Chief Nursing Executive,Rhonda Crocker-Ellacott said far more students than usualfailed the exam, noting that typically, seven per-cent of new graduates who are conditionally accepted to the hospital, don't pass.

"This year, we're looking at a five-to-six times greater failure rate," said Crocker-Ellacott.

This year was the first time an American company administered the registration exam, instead of the Canadian Nurses Association, a change that had students worried well in advance of the end of the school year.

The hospital can't comment on why more students are failing, Crocker-Ellacott said. "I don't want to second-guess why there are so many failures," she continued. "It's interesting that there's a new exam and there's more failures, so there's something going on there."

Hospital officials getting 'a bit creative,' to cover summer staff

The significantly higher-than-average failure rate meant Crocker-Ellacott and her staff found themselves short of peoplewhen hiring for the summer.

To counteract this, she said the hospital created a new position a "unit aide," not only for students that failed this year's exam, but also for students entering their final year of nursing school.

"[It's] to really to mitigate the gap between the vacancies created by the new grads that were unsuccessful," she said. "We've put that into place from now until the beginning of September, and we're confident that this will address the workload issues on the units."

The aides will be responsible for things like feeding and bathing, or "providing personal care to patients," Crocker-Ellacott said. "They're not providing the specialty care needs like medication administration, or wound care or anything like that."

The contingency started on Monday, and patient care hasn't been negatively affected, she added.

How many students are failing this year?

The pass-fail rate for the recent graduates in Thunder Bay isn't yet clear. In an e-mailed statement, Bill Clarke, a communications specialist with the College of Nurses of Ontario, said the college isn't in a position to release results yet.

"Many factors are at play in these early months of the exam," he wrote. "For example, applicants are writing the exam every day instead of all on a single day, as was the case with the previous exam."

"This means that many schools haven't had an entire graduating class complete their first attempts at the exam."

The results won't be released until this fall, at the earliest, Clarke said.

When the pass-fail rates are released, nursing school officials at Lakehead University saidthey'll use that data to help their students.

Director Karen Poole said in an e-mailed statement that the university offered help to students over the past two years to help them transition to the new exam, including on-campus workshops, links to the test plan, and a weekend workshop.