DECLINING numbers in the nursing system have been partly blamed on a high failure rate among students.

According to former Minister of Health Senator Liz Thompson, the failure rate of students doing the nursing exam tends to be as high as 60 per cent – and this has been going on for years.

Saying she had investigated and tried to alleviate the problem, Thompson said it explained why the required numbers of nurses were not being deployed across the polyclinic, geriatric and Queen Elizabeth Hospital system.

She said it also explained why the former Government had opted to recruit nurses from outside of the region, given Barbados' commitment to regional governments not to poach their nurses.

She urged that further investigation be done as to why the failure rate was so high, what were the issues that caused students to stumble in the exam, and whether working part of the time left them with no time to study.

"For some time we have been recording a fail rate as high as 60 per cent in the training of nurses, and if we are to move forward and have acceptable numbers that statistic needs to change and improve significantly," she told the Upper House during the debate on the Nurses Bill 2008.

She said she herself had sought to overcome this challenge by introducing health aides or nurses' aides into the system, thereby augmenting numbers and taking some strain off qualified nurses who needed to perform critical and specialised functions.

She advised that Government look at producing a slew of health aides to perform a range of services across the system.

Thompson also noted that nurses had not been sufficiently empowered as managers, and crucial decisions often had to be made by junior doctors with far less experience.

"An experienced nurse can in fact guide many junior doctors who have only seen certain experiences in the book or in their short internship; . . . nurses can be in a position to manage wards and aspects of healthcare administration that we need to look at," she said. (RJ)