No sanctions yet on PRC chief

Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) Chairman Leonor Rosero will not yet be sanctioned for allegedly causing confusion over the controversial nursing licensure examinations and contradicting the position of top government officials.

Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said the Palace and Labor Secretary Arturo Brion, who has supervision over Rosero, would be concentrating first on how to implement the order of the Court of Appeals (CA) "on the current situation," including the partial retake of the tests.

"We like to give her (Rosero) the benefit of the doubt," Bunye told reporters. "The roadmap of Secretary Brion is clear and he said he would take care first of the current situation and other matters would be taken care of later. First things first."

Bunye issued the statement after Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said last week that Rosero may be sanctioned for issuing statements contrary to the position taken by the Palace on the controversy over the leakage of test questions in the nursing board examination held nationwide on June 11 and 12.

Prior to the CA ruling last week, Rosero branded Brion as an "intruder" during a Senate hearing after President Arroyo signed Executive Order 565-A placing the PRC under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor and Employment.

Despite Malacañang’s position for a retake, Rosero insisted that there should be no retake of the examination since the leakage did not affect the overall results of the licensure tests after the PRC recomputed Tests III and V, some of whose questions were leaked.

On Sunday, Rosero again bypassed Brion and announced that the PRC was to conduct on Monday the oath-taking of the 17,000 new nurses who passed the licensure test and were not included in the CA order to retake Tests III and V.

Rosero’s announcement was apparently made without clearance from the Palace and it led hundreds of new nurses to flock to PRC office in Sampaloc, Manila to take their oath.

The frustrated nurses were later told that the PRC would not yet administer their oath.

However, Ermita and Brion on Monday announced that the oath-taking would not push through since the DOLE wants to make sure that those who may have benefitted from the leakage would retake the tests. Ermita said the CA decision is not yet final and executory and Brion issued a memo to Rosero not to push through with the oath-taking.

Brion said he would deal with Rosero, whom he said, may have failed to understand that the CA ruling was not yet final and executory.

Bunye said there may have been some miscommunication which explains why Rosero made such an announcement.

"Whatever I’ll tell Chairman Rosero are best taken up with the internal discussions of government and not through the media," said Brion, a former CA justice.

"We are just following the law in our moves," he said.

Brion will still push through with the conciliation efforts to prevent the issue from dragging on despite the filing of motion for reconsideration by some nursing professors of the University of Sto. Tomas with the CA.

He had already sent a letter to the CA asking it to consider leading the conciliation efforts with all stakeholders.

"I think this is something worth looking into and this is at times considered by the CA when an interested party seeks some sort of conciliation or mediation," Brion said.

Meanwhile, the Alliance of New Nurses (ANN) appealed to the public not to persecute the 1,687 examinees who may have to retake the licensure test for nursing if the CA ruling becomes final and executory.

ANN president Renato Aquino said the examinees are innocent of cheating, just like the majority of the more than 42,000 nursing graduates who took the June test.

"They were the ones who initially failed the test but passed after the recomputation of grades. They benefited from the recomputation but not from the leakage," Aquino told The STAR.

The CA had ordered the PRC to administer the oath-taking of the examinees who passed, except for the 1,687 examinees. The court had decided to invalidate the recomputation implemented by the PRC to cleanse the test of the leakage.

The court also upheld the original grade of more than 1,200 examinees who initially passed the test, but failed after recomputation.

Aquino said the examinees who passed should be allowed to take their oath and get their license soon so that they could move on with their life and help their families. — With Sheila Crisostomo