Fifty-eight per cent price increase for nurse licensing exam too steep for students: Union

The cost to write a license exam for nurses is going up by $210. Nathan Nahige says that it's yet another barrier to become a nurse in this province. We're just about to start practice, and it's almost like more limitations for us to overcome before we get into the practice. I mean, when you look at that increase, you've just got to look at it in perspective of a nurse student, right? So we already spend years paying tuition alongside working, you know, hundreds of hours in mandatory unpaid clinical placements. So an increase of 58% just means we have more cost to us before we even get into the career. The president of the Registered Nurses Union says this increase will make it harder for the province to recruit nurses with degrees from other countries. Some of those recruitment efforts included internationally-educated nurses, and some of them are here working as personal care attendants or licensed practical nurses, It has cost them, as well as their nursing students here in this province, an exorbitant amount of money in order to be eligible to work in this land and labor as a registered nurse. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the organization that administers the exam, did not provide an interview, but its website says that the fee has not changed since 2000, and the adjustment reflects 25 years of inflation. Yvette Coffey says that if the fee had to go up, it could have been incremental. I mean, everybody knows inflation is half of everything right now, but an incremental increase would be much better absorbed by nursing students, by internationally-educated nurses, than a 58% increase for next year. John Harris, CBC News, St. John's.