Salt Lake City-based Nightingale College filed a lawsuit against the California Board of Registered Nursing, saying the board’s application of two licensing standards is unlawful and preventing hundreds of students from taking the NCLEX-RN exam.
The lawsuit, filed Aug. 24, centers around two standards that Nightingale alleges are not authorized by California law and were not adopted as regulations to out-of-state licensure applicants. The standards are a 500-hour direct-patient-care threshold that Nightingale said governs only California-approved in-state nursing programs, and a “concurrency” that the board has not provided a workable definition for, according to an Aug. 28 college news release.
The enforcement of these standards has prevented more than 500 spring graduates from testing — with summer graduates facing the same issue — and graduates reported losing or jeopardizing nursing employment opportunities as they wait for approvals to begin testing.
The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order to prevent the board from applying the two standards while the lawsuit proceeds and requires the board to process pending Nightingale graduate applications.
“Nearly 2,000 of our graduates have taken the NCLEX and received licenses in California since 2015, completing the exact same coursework supposedly at issue here,” Mikhail Shneyder, BSN, Nightingale College CEO said in the news release. “We filed this action because our graduates deserve a fair, lawful and timely path to licensure.”
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