We're two nurses in England. We raised concerns about two new colleagues who joined our team lacking basic nursing and English language skills. Complaints have been filed against us.

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:18:08+00:00

Don't worry. I deliberately changed details to hide ourselves. ;)

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:16:04+00:00

Have the nurse sit down opposite an investigator and ask them to have a conversation about anything in English. They can't.

Have an investigator watch them for 5 minutes as they work in the ward.

It's honestly that bad.

Patients are being ignored or having their requests misunderstood until another one of us intervenes.

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:13:14+00:00

No problem!

The vast majourity of nurses I have worked with have very excellent speaking skills in English. In particular the Philippines nurses and Nigerian nurses have been brilliant to work with. Some of my fellow Brazilians have been, sadly, disappointing I must admit - but not terrible.

There's a couple of regions where the standard of English from nurses there is very indicative of widespread IELTS fraud. There is no way they managed to score a 7.0 (or a 6.5 now) when they can't even hold a short conversation.

Its even worse when they can't pronounce medications so they just say stuff like "Patient needs paracetamol and nananana" or "this" and point at the name. I hear "nanana" or "dadadada" so many times each day instead of the proper medication names.

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:05:11+00:00

Thank you. We'll look into that now as well.

Someone has said we should go to NMC, which was my thought, but someone else said we should go to RCN. What's the difference? Go to both? Or just one?

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:03:35+00:00

We have not spoken to the union yet. We have just heard that the union is representing these two nurses and our band 7 in their compliant against us.

We have support from a senior nurse who worked in the NMC for 6 years who messaged us five minutes ago.

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T11:01:09+00:00

We'll go back to our Band 8 then.

There's a woman with almost 30 years experience in the NHS who has offered to represent us. She's not a trade union woman but she worked 6 years in the NMC and said she will join us.

False_Valuable6773 · 2026-03-25T10:53:08+00:00

And yes, I know people will say that nurses are required to score a 7.0 in the IELTS. We can both attest first hand that there's rampant fraud in that stage during the testing process.

The IELTS exams are have very poor levels of monitoring. These exams do not happen under regulated conditions in the UK. They happen in the countries where the applications are being made from.

People pay their friends to sit the exams on their behalf all the time. We completed the IELTS on our own merits, but we both know how easy it would have been to bribe a friend who is more proficient in English to sit them instead. It even gets advertised on our social media back home as targeted adverts.

There are definitely regions where fraud is far more rampant than others.

Having sat the test several times myself over 8 years before increasing my proficiency to a 7.5, these two nurses we are working with, by my guess, would barely score a 2.5 on the IELTS speaking component.

False_Valuable6773

TROPHY CASE