NMBI requests a certificate from none existent authority (German Nursing Board)

Wolcan

Hello all:

If that's the wrong forum please feel free to point that out or an administrator might want to move it to a more appropriate forum.

My wife tries to register as nurse with NMBI. She is a full qualified Geriatric Nurse with over 20 years experience. So we requested the forms as outlined on nmbi.ie, paid the fee, filled in all the forms and send those in. We got an email asking for additional papers:

"Certificate of Good Standing and Verification from the German Nursing Authority"

We replied to that email by explaining that there is no such authority in Germany, and asked what exactly is the purpose of those requested certificate, so that we might be able to find something similar, which could serve the purpose. But unfortunately we didn't get any answer from the NMBI. It's now almost 2 month that we've been waiting. We even called in but it seems to be useless because the only thing that the call center agent did was to repeat over and over again this one sentence. We contacted the German Health Ministry who confirmed that there is no Nursing Board in Germany.

So, in total we paid already well over €1000 (fee + translations of the certificates, and references), we send two replies to the one and only email we got, and we called in. The result: Nothing, no response at all. We are a bit at a lost here, hence any help would be highly appreciated.

Our questions are:
a) What do they looking for?
b) What do those certificate state?
c) Is that NMBI business as usual?

Thanks in advance.

Regards.

WildRosie

I imagine they are looking for confirmation that your wife hasn't been subject to fitness to practice proceedings in Germany and that there are no restrictions on her registration there. Who is responsible for registering nurses in Germany? This suggests that this crowd are responsible for registering nurses in Berlin. There must be an equivalent organisation where she is from. And to answer your last question, yes I've heard foreign nurses complaining about the registration process with the NMBI before.

Wolcan

Hello WildRosi: Thanks for your answer. But as of now there is no central registration authority in Germany. It's a different system: One does his exam and that allows one do call themself a whatever-nurse depending on the exam. Whether a nurse is in good standing ( I mean in regards their knowledge and performance in the job) or not is documented through written qualified job references, which are mandatory in Germany. Every employer is obliged to write a qualified job reference when requested by the employee or when the employee leaves the the company/organization.

We hired a professional translation service here in Ireland who did notarized translations of my wife's references. The NMBI has them as well.

We still try to reach the NMBI in order to clarify what they want, but so far no feedback from them. It looks like that if a nurse comes from a country which hasn't a central nursing board, it can't register. But if that's true then the website is fraudulent because it doesn't says anything about prerequisites. If there were prerequisites then Germany should have been listed as country that isn't accepted because of the missing nursing board.

Wolcan

Quick heads up:

As Geriatric Nurse one has to contact the authority from which you got your professional certificate. It should be the health ministry in your county (e.g. Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) etc.). The NMBI wants the original and a certified translation of it.

So, we did that. Everything done as we were told: over one year later, and almost €2k spend, she was told, via an one-liner email, that she isn't eligible because they don't have a department for Geriatric Nurses. That's something we asked a couple of times at the very beginning. They told us that we shall apply for General Nurse. Which is also outlined in the leaflet: it states clearly that one shall apply for General Nurse, provide all the documentation, and they (NMBI) will then check the documentation and come back to the applicant with a decision letter. Now, the NMBI is refusing to send her a proper decision letter.

I can't help but thinking that's a massive fraud; the money is probably gone, but we're not giving up that easily, do we?

Next we will involve a lawyer, and maybe going public. Anybody else who encountered such or similar problems? Let's team up!