All he had to do was pass the licensing exam, which he wrote at the end of September. With 13 years of experience as a licensed midwife and another three as a school nurse back in Lebanon, Rizk had every reason to be confident. “I’m very high [grades] … I worked hard,” he said. So imagine her surprise – and overwhelming disappointment – when she failed. And Rizk was not alone. According to the professional class of nurses of Quebec (known by its French acronym OIIQ), 54.6 percent of students failed the licensing exams written at the end of September. For those taking the test for the first time, the failure rate was 48.6 percent – the lowest rate recorded in four years. As of 2018, the pass rate for first-time test takers has fallen between 71 and 96 percent. “The exam was not what we study in school,” said Rizk, who completed a 10-month professional integration program at CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal — specifically designed for people who had nursing certificates outside of Quebec. “It doesn’t make sense … it was ridiculous,” he said.
The exam does not reflect the reality of studies, says the teacher
Joseph Oujeil teaches nursing at CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal and CÉGEP André-Laurendeau. He said Rizk was his best student. “It was a surprise for me and a lot of my students, and I’m talking about brilliant students with very good grades,” Oujeil said. Marie-Soleil Robinson, another student who failed the exam in September, said only seven of her 30 classmates passed. Oujeil said this failure rate is not a normal situation and comes at a dire time as Quebec faces a shortage of nurses. “I think the average results have to be looked at,” Oujeil said. The test results come at a time when emergency and other hospital departments across the province have been forced to close or reduce hours due to a shortage of nurses. (Shutterstock/Alliance Images) He said students told him the exam “doesn’t reflect the true reality of what we teach them in school or during their studies and it also doesn’t reflect what they’ve seen in their clinical training.” Rizk wants to see the grades revised. Otherwise, he’ll be back on the exam table in March after even more money and months spent studying. “It’s not fair,” he said.
Pandemic to blame, says OIIQ
A spokesperson for the Quebec Order of Nurses, Chantal Lemay, said the exam has been pretty much the same for years. What has changed, he added, is the environment in which students learn. “We think the pandemic had to do with how well students were able to consolidate what they had learned during their education,” Lemay said. Chantal Lemay, a spokeswoman for Quebec’s professional nursing class, says the exams have been pretty much the same for years, but the pandemic may have had an effect on the results this year. (Radio-Canada) Even as the Quebec government struggles to fill ever-widening gaps in nursing staff across the province, Lemay said the OIIQ is not going to lower its standards. “Our mandate is to protect the public, and to do that, we have this examination,” Lemay said. The Quebec government has struggled to hire nurses throughout the pandemic as overworked staff quit in droves. Tens of thousands have moved into the private sector, left the province or left the profession altogether. Emergency rooms and other hospitals across the province have been forced to close or reduce hours due to the shortage of nurses. And forcing nurses to work a lot of overtime each week just to make up for the shortage led to greater exhaustion.
28,000 new nurses are needed in Quebec over the next 5 years
Last year, Quebec launched a historic overseas recruitment drive to recruit 4,000 nurses and social workers. But the situation remained dire in early 2022, forcing Prime Minister François Lego to ask civil servants to volunteer in hospitals to make up for the losses. Along with offering incentive programs to attract private sector employees to the public system, Quebec announced in February a $65 million investment to recruit and train approximately 1,000 nurses from French-speaking countries to work in seven areas of the province where the shortage of nurses is most acute. Health Minister Christian Dubé also allocated $750 million over five years to train and hire a few thousand administrative assistants to ease the burden on nurses. Regardless, a government health care study last April found that graduation, immigration and other measures won’t meet the province’s needs. The study found that 28,000 new hires will be needed over the next five years.
