The making of an SRN

However, he admits that those graduates who wish to work abroad will have to take and pass that examination if they want to work abroad.

Traditionally, nurses were trained under an apprenticeship scheme in which they were attached to a training and teaching hospital and spent the time outside of classes in formal training on the hospital wards — even night duty.

Hence over the period of their apprenticeship the student nurse obtained a substantial amount of practical training and experience on the wards. The student nurse then took a professional examination which included tests as to his/her ability to perform on the ward. Passing this series of tests then endowed the nurse with a professional qualification to practice and the ability to proceed to more specialised programmes of study.

Sometime ago the decision was taken to remove the responsibility for the training of nurses from the hospitals and this was assigned to NIHERST/ COSTAATT. This training could not include the breadth of the on-the-ward training and experience of the apprenticeship scheme. Hence the graduate nurse (including the one who had a BSc in nursing) of the local accredited school would be hard pressed to pass a professional examination as visualised by the Nursing Council. Hence bypassing the council’s examination will put graduate nurses on the ward as professionals without the requisite training and experience of the ward — so much so that these graduate nurses are referred to as “computer nurses” who can source any information you want but are not yet up to the job of a practicing professional nurse.

Other professions have faced this problem before. What is done in conjunction with the professional body is: the schools in consultation with the professional body do what they are good at and the professional body (eg nursing council) accepts the award of the schools. However these awards do not mark the graduates as professional nurses or engineers or doctors or whatever. The required on-the-job tra-

ining and experience is still to be gained.

What Khan and his Cabinet should have done is to employ the certified nurses from the accredited schools simply as graduate nurses to work under supervision and restrict their activities and responsibilities until they attain professional status via the Nursing Council examination of such skills.

What some professional bodies have done is to define a series of training and experiences that the graduate should undergo and award the professional badge on a report from an accredited place of empl-

oyment that this has been done.

The professional exam is still maintained for anyone who may not be in an accredited place of employment. I encountered the same problem of “computer nurses” when I was employed in the US as a nurse.

They had BSc degrees but had very little ward experience as compared with the traditionally trained Irish nurses.

MK King

SRN, SCM, Paed Cert (UK)

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