PRC asks appeals court to allow nurses’ oath

First posted 08:23pm (Mla time)
Sept 12, 2006
By Armand Nocum
Inquirer

THE Professional Regulatory Commission (PRC) and the Board of Nursing (BON) asked the Court of Appeals Tuesday to lift its order stopping the oath-taking of about 17,000 new nurses who passed the scandal-tainted nursing licensure examinations last June.

In a 48-page comment, the PRC and BON, through Solicitor General Eduardo Nachura, questioned the legal standing of the University of Santo Tomas’ College of Nursing Faculty Association, the League of Concerned Nurses and the Binuklod na Samahan ng mga Student Nurse to seek the temporary restraining order.

The groups had asked the court to stop the August 22 oath-taking of those who successfully passed the nursing exam.

They also asked the court to strike down a BON decision to merely re-compute the grades to arrive at the passing score and order a re-examination of those parts of the test that were tainted by cheating.

The appellate court obliged by issuing a 60-day temporary restraining order last August 18.
According to Nachura, the petitioners were not able to prove that they would suffer actual injury arising from the PRC and BON decision not to order a re-examination.

He said that two of the petitioners were not even registered nurses or candidates who took the June exam.

“Even if they were, they have utterly failed to prove that their right to life, liberty and property is impaired or in danger of being impaired, their reputation in the nursing or academic community prejudiced, or their financial or economic status diminished,” Nachura said.

He said it was the 17,821 board passers who should be considered the real parties in interest.
“Their right to the unimpeded pursuit of their profession is at stake. They are the real parties in interest bound to be prejudiced or benefited by any judgment in this action,” said Nachura.

The failure to include them in the petition warranted its outright dismissal, he said.

PRC and BON officials defended their decision to address the cheating issue through a statistical averaging of the test results instead of requiring a retake of parts IV and V of the test.

They said their move was based on “widely accepted and established methods of statistics, testing and evaluation, consistent with their mandate to protect the integrity of every professional licensure examination, taking into consideration public interest, public health, and public safety.”

They said their decision against a partial retake of the nursing examination had a precedent in the similarly tainted 2003 bar examinations.

In the latter case, the Supreme Court nullified and ordered a retake of the mercantile law exam because of a reported leak of test questions.

But due to various petitions assailing the order for a re-examination, the high court canceled the retake and instead decided to allocate the 15 percent mercantile exam points among the seven other subjects.

Nachura argued that a retake of the examinations would have cost each of the examinees 82,000 pesos and the government 11.3 million pesos, apart from the physical and emotional distress the nursing graduates would have to bear.