CHED eyes grants for nursing schools holding review classes for non-board passers

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Higher Education is considering providing grants to the country’s top nursing schools to hold review classes for nursing graduates who fail to pass the licensure exam for nurses.

During a Malacañang press briefing, CHED Chairperson Popoy De Vera said that the commission is working with the Department of Health (DOH), private hospitals and universities that “have a very good track record in having review classes” to subsidize the review classes of nursing graduates who will retake the board exam.

Only an average of 54% of all nursing graduates — or one in two — passed the licensure exam for nurses from 2017 to 2022, based on data from the Professional Regulations Commission

“We will hold special review classes for (nursing graduates) employed in the DOH and private hospitals so they can pass the board exam,” De Vera said. “We will give grants to the universities and the private hospitals.”

De Vera said that the “first intervention” for non-board passers should be to ask them to undergo review classes at the country’s top nursing schools with a high passing rate in the licensure exam.

De Vera also said that CHED had earlier briefed Malacañang about the need to address the shortage of nurses in the country beginning with the “pool of graduates out there who can’t work as nurses because they did not pass the licensure exam.”

CHED has also considered tying up with the Technical Education And Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to create short courses to produce “healthcare assistants” that will handle tasks adjacent to patient care, De Vera said.

“CHED is now working with DOH to identify those tasks, such as taking blood pressure, fixing the patient. Possibly CHED and TESDA will issue these certificates,” De Vera said in Filipino.

Since lifting the moratorium on new nursing programs, at least 54 universities have applied to CHED to open new nursing programs, which is estimated to produce 2,052 nursing students by the academic year 2027 - 2028, according to CHED.

De Vera has previously said that based on DOH data, around 51% of the country's nurses have migrated to other countries.

The low board passing rate of nurses prompted a lawmaker from the House of Representatives in April to call on CHED to review the nursing curriculum and the quality of nursing programs, calling the "processes" of accrediting nurses to be "anti-student, anti-poor and arbitrary." — Cristina Chi