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Brown Bag Lunch Seminar looks at recognition of Prior Learning for Nursing Profession
The first DENOSA Brown Bag Lunch Seminar this year, held on the second day of the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on the 4th of April 2014 in Pretoria, looked at the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) for the nursing profession, where he urged the nursing profession to take advantage of the newly-released policy on RPL.
Deputy Director at South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), Dr Loffie Naude delivered the presentation to the more than 60 representatives of DENOSA and nurses in and around Gauteng.
At SAQA, Dr Naude is responsible for the coordination of around 20 RPL projects amongst other duties at SAQA. He researched RPL, Lifelong Learning and Credit Accumulation and Transfer (CAT) and published in international refereed Journals.
As a form of recognition for knowledge gained in normal life whereby an individual is taken through a formal assessment to evaluate the knowledge, skills and attitude of an individual against the requirements of a certain job.
He says RPL is a simple way of saying “you say you know; then show me what you know”. “The method of assessing a person must be in the same way as if you’ve gone through a formal study. In fact, RPL is more difficult that going through a formal education setting,” he says, adding that in spite of that, it prepares you.
He said this has worked in many sectors and corporations where workers with no formal qualification had gone through the RPL process and, as a result, progressed in life and job levels in their workplace. This comes in handy in an environment where there are 17000 community development workers without a ‘paper’ qualification, and they need to be assisted, he added. This includes artisans, technical entrepreneurs, public sector projects (such as SAPS, Departments of Correctional Services, Defence, Transport, Public Service and Administration.
Dr Naude applauds the RPL as it has also worked in Etv, SITA, Road Traffic Management Corporation, SABS and SAQA itself.
The one noticeable department that is not listed as the beneficiary of the RPL programme is the Department of Health. In this regard, his advice is that this can be done by following a few steps. The first step is to establish a steering committee representative of key stakeholders in health. “Secondly, conduct an audit to determine how many nurses are eligible…” The other steps include developing an RPL model, which will be followed by the roll out of RPL.
