The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) have changed the resit requirements for nurses and midwives from outside the UK and Europe taking the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE).
The OSCE is designed to test applicants in clinical performance and competency skills, e.g. communication, clinical examination and medical procedures.
‘Under these new changes, test centres will only require applicants to re-sit the parts of the OSCE assessment they failed and will not need to re-sit parts of the exam they have previously passed,’ said the NMC in a statement.
‘This change is the first of a series of changes we will be making as a result of our review of our overseas processes.’
The hope is that this will make the test more flexible for resit candidates as well as guarantee new recruits to the workforce meet the necessary standards given the current staffing shortage.
Since the Brexit vote in 2016, there was an 87% decrease in the number of nurses joining from the EU. According to figures from the NMC, between April 2017 and March 2018, 3962 nurses and midwives left and only
805 joined .
Recruiting from non-EU countries may be vital to the stabilisation of the workforce and filling out the register – the declining size of the register has also caused the NMC to review the registration fee.
Other areas the NMC are reviewing include the registration process, e.g. how candidates submit applications, the fees they pay, how they demonstrate their knowledge is of equal standards to UK education, as well as English language capability tests.
This will also include a review of the new role of nursing associates – a position that was created to bridge the skills gap between nurses and healthcare assistants. The changes will take occur from the 16 July 2018.