PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Department has started entrance test for admission to the nursing and paramedical schools with a view to select candidates on merit and improve quality of health care at the public sector hospitals of the province.

“We have started selecting candidates for the nursing schools through National Testing Service to ensure that talented students are selected for training as nurses and paramedics. We need a merit-based system because most of the lessons and training modules are in English,” Provincial Health Services Academy director Dr Tahir Nadeem told Dawn.

He said that the entry test would discourage unintelligent people and improve the patient care, which was part of the long-term policy. He said that there were instances where students were selected on the basis of their score in the SSC and FSc examinations, but later it became evident that those students weren’t good to pursue their courses properly.

“This year, we have asked the students to apply through NTS so we can select right candidates,” he said. Giving breakup of the merit for the nursing and paramedical schools, he said that 50 per cent marks would come from NTS, while 30 per cent had been allocated to SSC and 20 per cent to FSc (pre-medical group). He said that only physical verification of the candidates and their documents would take place during the interview.

Dr Nadeem said that the new system had been introduced because more people would come to join nursing and paramedical fields due to rise in their salaries by the government recently. He said that the monthly stipend of the student nurses had been increased from Rs5,000 to Rs2000.

“We are going to select over 300 nursing students for 10 colleges of the province,” he said, adding that there would be centralised merit list and each candidate would get the college of his choice on merit.

Dr Nadeem said that in 2014 the provincial government had issued a notification asking the department to make recruitments through NTS to ensure merit. He said that the four public health schools would also select their students for Entrance test for nursing, paramedical schools launched training of lady health visitors through NTS.

Sources said that earlier the health services academy would select nursing and paramedical students for training on the basis of their marks obtained in secondary school certificate (SSC) examinations and FSc.

The government has already introduced entrance test for admission to the medical colleges and engineering university due to the fact that many students selected on the basis of their FSc marks didn’t perform well. The sources said that teachers had been complaining that many students didn’t perform well academically despite getting higher marks.

They said that the entrance test was started about 15 years ago and the medical and engineering teachers had expressed satisfaction over the selection of intelligent students.

Published in Dawn September 18th, 2016