This Petition is to address the significant Nursing staffing shortage in Australia.

Nursing Board of Australia can make this situation better if they are willing to make some changes.

1) OSCE( Objective Structured Clinical Examination) ,which is included in the second part of  the new system established for assessing the competency of Overseas nurses in Australia should be revised .

There are many drawbacks to this system. Some of them are :

a)There is only one centre for this examination overall in Australia. 
b)Only one chance is given for the candidates to pass this exam with an examination fee of 4000 Australian dollars. 
c)Second Chance to write another OSCE examination as per AHPRA is weeks after the first exam and hence remain an uncertainity.More over,
Candidates have to pay another 4000 dollars to write the exam in addition to accommodation, living cost, travel costs etc .

2)As this COVID pandemic situation was unpredicted and the borders remain closed for a long period ,many nursing boards including New Zealand nursing board extended their validity requirement for English tests from 2 years to 3 years while Nursing board of Australia asks the nurses to rewrite the language tests once again.Hence Nurses are forced to choose other countries over Australia.The language test validity should be increased from 2 years.

3)While the new System to assess the competency of Overseas nurses is working slowly, to bridge the massive shortage of nursing workforce , Previous assessment programme such as EPIQ programme should be re-started for at least a short span of time until OSCE gets completely effective.
4)Enable direct registration for Nurses who are registered in countries like UK , Ireland , Canada .

These nurses are already adopted with the workforce and Culture .

5)There are lot of overseas trained , well qualified and experienced nurses who works as carers in different organisations across Australia. They can be brought to the work force after proper employer training and assessment. 
It’s like saying “ we are hungry “, when we have properly cooked and processed frozen food in the freezer . We just have to microwave it..!!!