The Japanese licensure examinations for nurses will not be translated entirely into English, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) said Saturday. The clarification came from a representative of the Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW), the POEA amid reports that foreign nurses who want work in Japan are having difficulties to pass the exam. But the POEA said the MHLW is studying recommendations from focus group discussions (FGD) held in Manila among stakeholders. Participants in the FGD include hospital presidents, officials and professors of nursing schools, and other interest groups in the field of nursing, along with the Institute of Human Language. “Among the suggestions from the said FGDs were to paraphrase certain difficult words or expressions into easier terms, provide Japanese hiragana characters for certain difficult kanji characters, include the subject and object in the Japanese sentence construction, and annotate special nursing terms and names of diseases in English, including internationally recognized abbreviations,” the POEA said. Hiragana and kanji are Japanese writing systems, with the former being used for traditional Japanese words and the latter being ideographs borrowed from Chinese characters. The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has pushed for intensified language training for Japan-bound nurses and caregivers to give them a better chance of passing the difficult examinations there. Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz cited recent reports that no foreign applicant passed last year's exams and only 1.2 percent of foreign applicants passed the most recent exams. She said this was due to the difficulty of the examinees in understanding kanji and technical terms written in Japanese. Maria Luz Talento, Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO) officer-in-charge and welfare officer in Tokyo, meanwhile said the language program should focus on communication skills more than simple language skills. Talento said that while candidate nurses and caregivers are able to speak Japanese, they have problems with oral and written communication with their co-workers and immediate superiors in their place of work. Filipinos are being hired as nurses and caregivers in Japan under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement or JPEPA. The first batch of Filipino nurses and caregivers sent to Japan were given language training before they were sent to their workplaces.
