About eighteen months ago I had the idea to move to England and work as a nurse. I thought it’d be fun to go and explore the world, and to pay my way with the skills I’ve earned. I knew that to work as a nurse in the United Kingdom, I’d first have to register. I figured I’d fill out a few forms, send a few documents over, and before I knew it I’d be cleaning out wounds and sticking people with needles while they said charming things like, “Are you having a laugh?” and offering me copious amounts of tea. This was a delusional and naive presumption. (Not the charming things British people say, more the few documents thing. I’ve already genuinely been called “Poppet.” Twice).
It didn’t seem like a naive presumption at the time. The facts are these: I went to university for three years to train as a nurse. During that time I sat many exams and went through months of placement to prove my skills and knowledge were sufficient. After university, I completed a graduate year at Austin Hospital, one of Melbourne’s major metropolitan hospitals. I then worked for five years for the Royal District Nursing Service, becoming a team manager after the first year. I’m skilled up to my eyeballs, dammit.
I figured another first-world country, a country that is the mother of the commonwealth, the international collective to which Australia is a part of, would recognise these skills. I was wrong. I had to prove myself.
And over the last eighteen months I have learnt one thing: The process to register in the United Kingdom is a cold and unflinching bitch.
I’m now going to detail the arduous requirements that all Australian and New Zealand nurses have to go through in order to do the job they’re already trained for. I had to live through it, people, you only have to read about it…
To begin the process, I went online and punched my details into the registration website. This created an account for me with the various stages of registration mapped out — although all I had access to was the first stage. They put me firmly in my place; they didn’t want me getting ahead of myself. Looking back, this could be their catch-phrase:
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
The first stage was asking for the scores and ID number of an exam. As yet, I had not sat that exam, so I went about booking myself in. The exam cost somewhere in the vicinity of $400, and I was strongly encouraged to study and prepare for the day. I felt I had been studying and preparing for the exam my whole life — the exam was an English exam. I had to prove I had the necessary English skills to work as a nurse. This is despite the fact that English is the only language I know, a language I’ve spoken since the age of two, a language I completed school and five years of tertiary education in, two years of that tertiary education being in an English diploma. None of this mattered; I had to sit the exam.
So I did. I filed into a classroom with a collection of people for whom English was a second language, showed my passport (it was all very official), took my seat, and spent five hours writing, reading, interpreting, listening and speaking in English. The speaking component was a one-on-one interview, and when I met my interviewer and sat down, and it was obvious I was Australian-born, she looked at me and asked: “So why do you have to do this?”
I wanted to ask her the same question.
You’ll all be relieved to know I passed the exam. Shocking, right? In fact, I got full marks except for the listening component where I drifted off for a second and missed something the pre-recorded voice read out, and lost half a mark. So I’m officially a bad listener.
Exam done, I excitedly logged back in and put in my results details, and was rewarded by being able to access the next stage in the process. The next stage was an exam. Another one. Once again I went about booking myself in. This exam was to test my nursing theory, and cost somewhere in the vicinity of $350.
I wasn’t sure what to expect for this exam. The body of medical knowledge is a rather large one, and I didn’t know how to prepare for such a general topic, given that any aspect of health theory could technically be tested. Luckily, I was sent a document of what to study. This document was a forty-four page table consisting of minute areas to be tested, broken in to headings, sub-headings and sub-sub-headings. Most of it was entirely useless.
The table gave vague one-line wanky descriptions of what would be covered, saying very little of actual substance. Things like: “The ability to express the desires of the patient.” What? How do I study for the ability to express the desires of the patient? What sort of multiple choice question summarises something as subjective and variable as the ability to express the desires of the patient?
The document followed this up with links to various sites to which I gathered were places where I could get my answers. I would estimate that ninety percent of the links were dead, taking me down pathways to websites that no longer existed, and the ones that did work took me to journal articles with obscure titles such as: “Interpreting body language – A case study.”
None of this was helpful, and there were no questions in the exam relating to body language.
I did my own independent study on what I reasoned were the fundamentals of nursing theory and I passed.
At this point, I thought I was through the crucible. I knew once I got to London I’d have to sit a third and final practical exam, but this didn’t worry me greatly. I had passed two exams and was ready to be on my way. I was drafting my letter of resignation in my head. Thankfully, I never put the words to paper. It was a further ten months before I resigned.
I logged back on to see what was next expected of me and discovered that a mountain of paperwork was needed before anything further could be done. So, one by one, I went about obtaining, scanning in, and sending off the required documents.
I had to order a birth certificate, providing verified copies of various forms of identification to prove I was me and entitled to a record of my birth, I needed police checks, one for both Australia and the UK (although how I was supposed to have a criminal record in a country I’d never been to I have no idea), I contacted my registration board in Australia and for a $80 fee they agreed to send a single piece of paper to England proving I was a registered nurse in Australia. I had a multitude of blood test and booster shots, provided bank statements, and obtained declarations of good health from GPs stating I was mentally and physically fit for work.
And, hardest of all, I got in contact with my old university, a different campus from the one I attended as the one I attended no longer existed, and cajoled them into producing an eight-page document detailing down to the exact hour the subjects and placements I completed six years ago during university.
After months of administration and paying more money for these documents, I sent off a packet to the UK, and sat back and waited for my paperwork to be approved. This was it. The final hurdle before jumping on a plane and dropping into the rest of the world.
My documents were rejected…
(To be continued in Part 2…you lucky things)
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I’ve recently put up a new short story called “Thermodynamics and Reincarnation.”
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