ALMOST 1,000 foreign nurses have taken the National Council Licensing Examination in the CNMI since September, the Department of Labor and Immigration said.
“I sign an average of 41 applications in a week. We get hundreds in a month. There’s a lot of them,” DOLI Secretary Joaquin Tenorio said.
Tenorio said most of the applicants are from the Philippines.
DOLI expects to receive more applications due to the high demand in the U.S. for nurses.
“Nurses are much in demand right now so they’ll continue to choose CNMI as the NCLEX center,” he said.
Overseas registered nurses take the NCLEX at Northern Marianas College.
Tenorio said his department, along with other government agencies, aims to improve the testing center to accommodate more applicants.
Authorities said only three computers are available at NMC’s NCLEX center.
“We’re going to address that. We’ll make sure that more can be accommodated in a session,” Tenorio said.
Nurses usually arrive in groups but they cannot take the examination at the same time due to limited resources at the center.
