The UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is investigating “industrial-scale” qualification fraud by hundreds of nurses who applied to be registered and practice in the United Kingdom.
More than 700 frontline nurses from Nigeria are involved and are said to be under investigation. At least 48 of them are already practising in the UK.
Nursing and Midwifery Council’s chief executive Andrea Sutcliffe told The Guardian UK that the qualification fraud was the biggest ever of its kind.
“This is the first time we’ve found evidence of widespread fraud at a test centre,” she said.
It is alleged that proxies help nurses write key tests that must be passed for them to be registered and practice in the UK, The Guardian reported.
Most of the affected nurses wrote their tests at Yunnik Technologies, a computer-based test centre in Ibadan.
A Nursing and Midwifery Council CBT provider Pearson VUE, which had an agreement with Yunnik to conduct CBT for nurses, had raised concern last year that there was “widespread fraudulent activity” and suggested that proxies wrote tests for nurses.
Already, the 48 Nigerian nurses registered and practising in the UK have been told to retake their tests. However, NMC cannot suspend them unless if ordered by an independent panel at a hearing.
“We have now completed our initial investigation,” NMC said in a statement in September. While the majority of the individuals who sat their CBT at the Yunnik centre are not considered to have joined our register fraudulently, we believe there is evidence of widespread fraud at the Yunnik site.”
The 48 nurses will face a panel in March. They are expected to answer how they took and passed their computer-based tests that included questions on numeracy and clinical knowledge at Yunnik.
The NMC, however, is taking a more direct approach in the case of 669 others, including midwives, whose results were allegedly obtained through fraud. Most of them are already in the UK.
80 of the 669 applied to be registered by NMC. But the Council declined and banned almost all of them because it had “serious concerns” about their test results.
NMC said they will need to obtain a new CBT result to complete their application,.
“Those individuals will have the opportunity to provide the Assistant Registrar with any written information about the circumstances in which they took their CBT at Yunnik, plus any other mitigating factors, character references or other information they wish to give,” NMC said.
Sutcliffe said in an earlier statement that the Council would be fair to the nurses concerned.
“We’re committed to managing these concerns in the safest and fairest way we can,” Sutcliffe said. “It’s been essential to look carefully at all the data and other information presented to us before deciding on the right and proportionate approach for everyone.”
