The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has said 48 nurses in its service are suspected to have been beneficiaries of a qualification fraud.
It said over 700 nurses are suspected to be involved in the potential scandal which includes proxies impersonating nurses and taking a key test in Nigeria to make them registered and allowed to work in the UK.
“It’s very, very worrying if … there’s an organisation that’s involving themselves in fraudulent activity, enabling nurses to bypass these tests, or if they are using surrogates to do exams for them because the implication is that we end up in the UK with nurses who aren’t competent,”the Guardian quoted Peter Carter, the ex-chief executive of the RCN and ex-chair of three NHS trusts, to have said.
The 48 are due to face individual hearings, starting in March, at which they will be asked to explain how they apparently took and passed the computer-based test (CBT) of numeracy and clinical knowledge taken at the Yunnik test centre in Ibadan, Oyo State.
If found guilty, the individuals may be removed from the register.
The deception at Yunnik has led to the Nursing and Midwifery Council declaring the CBT test results apparently obtained by 1,955 Nigerian-trained health professionals to be invalid. All of them, even including the 1,238 about whom the regulator says it cannot prove fraud was involved, have been given three chances to resit the CBT test, or face expulsion or exclusion from the register.
The future of the 717 nurses remains unclear. The GMB union fears that those refused on to the NMC register will be sent back to Nigeria. It said nurses had been “exploited” in Nigeria, urged the NMC to let all those with suspect test results to be allowed to retake the test in the UK and said the health service needed their skills to help address the UK-wide shortage of nurses.
The GMB said two Nigerian women who are members had had their applications for NMC registration refused, despite insisting that their test results from Yunnik were legitimate. Both had then been dismissed by the private care home where they were working, until their status was established, and they now fear they will be deported to Nigeria with their families.
