A question about Credential Evaluation Service and CGFNS

Hello all,

Today I joined your board and just wanted to tell you that this is a great forum.

Anyways, I have a question ... Currently, I am living in Illinois, however, I have received my RN nursing degree in Lithuania about 9 years ago. I have not worked as a nurse in the states yet, but now I am interested in transfering my nursing degree into a US RN diploma. I understand that I need to get my credits evaluated to the US standarts by credential evaluation services like CES of CGFNS. I also know that if CES thinks that I do not have enough credit hours to transfer my diploma, they might tell me to go to college and receive the required number of credits in order to satisfy the American RN nursing diploma. The dillema is that I really do not want to go to college to satisfy the required number of hours. Thus, I am interested if there is a way of knowing how many credit hours does CGFNS needs in order to transfer my diploma. If I would have to send in all the paperwork to CES and wait till they tell me what is up that would cost me money and, more importantly, time. Maybe there is a website or something else where I could check if I have enough credit hours from my Lithuanian diploma in order to transfer it to US degree?

Thanks in advance, Mark M.

Do you have equivalent of a BSN? How long was your program? If you have a true diploma program certificate, was it two years or three years? With the two year program, you will not meet the requirements. If it is the 3 year, you have a chance. They do not go by credit hours as far as aproving your credentials, but by the number of hours in theory and clinicals that you have in each of the required areas. They also treat each application on an individual basis, so the best info that I can give you is to apply and see what they say. There is no blanket answer for this...........

Hope that this helps.................... :balloons:

If you go to the International area on this forum you will find many threads on this topic. Again as I stated above, CGFNS reviews each application on its own. There have been several nurses from India who completed a three year program, and some were accepted and some weren't. And they were in the same program but had taken different electives.

This is the best answer that anyone will be able to give you. Even CGFNS will not give you an answer if you phine them, unless they see your credentials in front of them. You will save yourself alot of time and grief, if you just submit.............they are the ones that have final say in this matter, not anyone else, even your state board.

Good luck................... :balloons:

You may want to post this under the International section also to get more feed back from other nurses, but it will be the same............

Happy New Year to you also..................... :balloons: