Nursing shortage ?

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So I here people talk about the nursing shortage all the. Time here so I found this story odd . I was chating with the nurse I had in the hospital and told me " I have no idea how I ended up in nursing I went to school to be a teacher " she then told me she had been a cna and the hospital she worked at had a large nursing shortage that was so bad they where bring in people from over seas . So they told her they would pay for her schooling ,pay her as was at work full time when she was at school and give. Her a job at the end of school . That sounds like a grate deal to me :lol2:

But this was the first I had heard of hospital bringing people in from overseas ?

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Specializes in medical surgical.

You need to google House Bill 1929. They want to bring in 20,000 nurses from overseas each year. This is because our government believes that a dire shortage exists, yet our own new grads cannot get jobs. I even attended a town meeting and brought this up. They have no clue. Anyway Sensenbrenner is the one who is sponsoring the bill.

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Specializes in medical surgical.

Also of note, these individuals will have a free pass through Homeland Security. They are to be rushed through within 30 days bypassing other security measures.

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Even if hospitals aren't bringing people in from overseas directly, the fact that so many of them hire non-citizens when there are so many unemployed citizens makes me angry.

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Specializes in Complex pedi to LTC/SA & now a manager.

Is she a new nurse? Situations like you describe were common in the late 1980's and through the 1990's. Some facilities also continued this practice through early 2000's (around 2005 or so) Many hospitals were offering current good employees and non-employee students the opportunity to return to school for nursing, they would pay their tuition up front (or reimburse) , pay them full time wages while in school even if they part time hours (usually work Sat & Sun 12hrs but off M-F for school but still get full time pay and benefits but when school was out you were required to work a full time schedule), in exchange you would be required to work a full time RN position, one year for each year of schooling funded. At the same time nurses were heavily recruited from overseas to fill vacancies when they were unable to fill with qualified US nurses. (as recently as 2005). In my area there is no active recruitment of foreign nurses as the market is saturated with underemployed experienced RN's & LPNs and new graduates. Many hospitals actually let the new grads out of their tuition-employment contract without penalty as there were no jobs for the newly minted RN's to fill. Are you certain that the situation your nurse described occurred recently and not 5 or 10 years ago?

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Is she a new nurse? Situations like you describe were common in the late 1980's and through the 1990's. Some facilities also continued this practice through early 2000's (around 2005 or so) Many hospitals were offering current good employees and non-employee students the opportunity to return to school for nursing, they would pay their tuition up front (or reimburse) , pay them full time wages while in school even if they part time hours (usually work Sat & Sun 12hrs but off M-F for school but still get full time pay and benefits but when school was out you were required to work a full time schedule), in exchange you would be required to work a full time RN position, one year for each year of schooling funded. At the same time nurses were heavily recruited from overseas to fill vacancies when they were unable to fill with qualified US nurses. (as recently as 2005). In my area there is no active recruitment of foreign nurses as the market is saturated with underemployed experienced RN's & LPNs and new graduates. Many hospitals actually let the new grads out of their tuition-employment contract without penalty as there were no jobs for the newly minted RN's to fill. Are you certain that the situation your nurse described occurred recently and not 5 or 10 years ago?

She had been a nurse for a few years 3-5 maybe I do not remember

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When I went to nursing school in the 70's in Philadelphia, the hospital had many Filopino nurses on its staff. But by 1975 or so, they were no longer recruiting them, just allowing those who were already here to remain. Most returned home; those that stayed were frequently married to someone here.

It is a shame that we cannot manage to band together to defeat this measure and to educate the public and our legislators about the real state of nursing employment.

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Specializes in ICU.

It isn't just nurses, almost all of our lab personnel are from outside the US. Some of them can barely speak English, and we have a hard time understanding them.

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Specializes in Complex pedi to LTC/SA & now a manager.
She had been a nurse for a few years 3-5 maybe I do not remember

So let's say she's been a nurse for 5 years. 3-4 years for nursing school. What she described was still going on in the early 2000's. My sister was actively recruited in '99/'00 with a sign on bonus, relocation expenses, tuition reimbursement, and they even paid the early termination fees on her lease plus the extra stipend on her new lease so she could bring her crazy dog with her. She likely got in a program like I described right at the end of the cycles. The local hospitals were offering such a program through 2002/2003 for qualified employees (they were no longer offering the program to prospective hires but permitting current health system employees to take advantage of the program). The last Filipino & international nurses were recruited in 2002 (the office I worked for at the time handled the lease agreement) but my friend in HR said that when their visas were up in 2005 or so they hospital did not/would not sponsor them for green cards (as they had in previous years) so technically when their contracts were up they were to return home as is intended with a visitor work visa. So it looks like your nurse was fortunate to get in on the tail end of such programs. Since then nursing programs have exploded with new RN & LPN graduates (especially with private/for-profit schools offering no wait for high tuition), plus the economy down turn causing some per diem & semi-retired experienced nurses to return to the work force full-time. In addition the hospitals cut staffing budgets and reduced the number of nursing positions offered/replaced thus increasing the number of individuals searching for full time employment.

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This is continuing in careful ways. Healthcare is very corporate. Nobody wants to pay nurses. The way to drastically cut the expense of having nurses on staff is to hire foreign nurses. Once you achieve 80 percent foreign nurses (one country is favored) you can begin to cut working conditions globally. The US highly educated/experienced nurses end up leaving because of the poor working conditions eventually and then you can really double down and make even more changes.

Here in the US, hospital corporations only want huge profit, and they will do anything to keep that profit. It remains easy to do this by going with foreign nurses. There is an "understanding" that foreign nurses are more desperate, uneducated in all but task oriented work, have no plans for a better life other than a basic life, are so used to being treated like animals where they used to live - that anything is better, can be forced into doing anything for fear of not being able to send money to family back home.

This does a lot of bad things. The big ones are:

1. Fosters abuse (no hospital corporation is concerned about foreign worker welfare, they tend to keep their mouths shut)

2. Hospitials are eroding the autonomy of nursing staff globally, so that "task" or Mc Donalds/Walmart level workers are the new model for nursing staff. Evidence is in P&P, and EMR that tells you how to pee. BSN degrees are just a cheap piece of paper in some countries, and that's fine with the US hospital system. All they want is the piece of paper.

3. Patient care will suffer, but nobody cares. You can easily get rid of a foreign worker, and know that worker won't "whistle-blow" or even attempt to get legal help. Hospital administration is very aware of cultural tendencies when they hire.

Until foreign nurses decide they want to REALLY be Americans and stand up for themselves, the conditions are going to worsen dramatically. But having said that, once they do realize after being here a while, they too will be told to put up or shut up since there are so many "of them" begging to come here from their home country.

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Specializes in LTC, Med-Surge, Ortho.
Even if hospitals aren't bringing people in from overseas directly, the fact that so many of them hire non-citizens when there are so many unemployed citizens makes me angry.

I think the hospitals pay the non citizen nurses less than the citzen nurses, i may be wrong:confused:

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

There is no shortage. There are nurses saidto be imported, this does help to saturate the markets and place the hospitals in the drivers seat. This has been argued here for quite sometime but the threads sometimes get closed as they get pretty heated sometimes.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.1929:#

https://allnurses.com/general-nursing-discussion/foreign-nurses-taking-369090.html

https://allnurses.com/nursing-career-advice/new-grad-rn-407045.html

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