By Dr. Brian Sampa

HPCZ SHOULD RESCIND THE DECISION TO REINTRODUCE LICENSURE EXAMS.

For the following reasons;

1. HPCZ has got no constitution mandate to assure quality.Its the Higher Education Authority(HEA) which is tasked to do so.

2. Competence of a person can not be determined in one exam.Most importantly the quality of graduates doesn’t solely depend on the students but lecturers and other factors.

3. HPCZ has got no other major source of income after the enactment of the higher education authority act of 2021 which moved registration, accreditation and quality assurance of health universities and colleges from HPCZ to HEA.So they want to use exams as a source of income.

4. It is a political trap to limit the number of health workers who will be available on the market at a particular time.Its bound to be used by the politicians to control how many people can qualify for employment at a given time and stop the embarrassment of having 137,000 people applying against 11,276 jobs.

5. Introduction of Licensure exams by HPCZ means that higher education authority is failing in it’s quality assurance.So HPCZ doesn’t trust the works of HEA.

6. The constitution only allows HPCZ to examine those trained outside the country to ascertain the education standards they trained under.

7. HPCZ did not respect the result of the consultative meeting which was held with associations.The decision was already made immediately HPCZ noticed that it’s mandate was reduced to giving licenses after the enactment of the HEA act.

Our Proposal

If HPCZ feels HEA is producing incompetent graduates not fit to be given practicing licenses let them advise HEA and see how they can monitor how people are being trained in these institutions.It starts with the quality of lecturers, selection criteria of students and curriculum.They could aswel introduce standardized examinations at different levels during their training so that the progression is monitored.Otherwise the said exams are I’ll intended.

BCS.1//05//2022

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