Overseas nurse

[lilstudentnurse19]

Hi everyone, I am an Australian Nurse/Midwife with two bachelors, moving to Seattle and had a few questions -

1. Are there many conversion programs offered for overseas nurses and midwives?

2. With 1-2 years experience, would hospitals still look at grades when hiring?

- Thank you.

[BonnieSc]

I don't think hospitals are interested in grades, no.

There are a couple of academic/clinical programs for foreign nurse graduates, but I think they are really aimed at nurses from developing countries for whom English is the second or third language. I doubt you would have trouble getting licensed as a bachelor's educated nurse from Australia on your own. But do you have your visa? I have never heard about local employers who offer work visas here; I also haven't looked into it, but I don't think it's common if it exists at all.

If you have a work-eligible visa, or are having it processed, check out the Washington State Board of Registered Nursing guidelines for foreign-educated nurses. My husband is a foreign-educated nurse and we're waiting for his visa to come through. In the meantime, he's having his transcripts evaluated through CGFNS, studying for TOEFL (which you won't have to do) and studying for NCLEX. Once he gets here, I anticipate that he'll probably do an advanced English-language course and an NCLEX prep course, and possibly one of those bridge courses for foreign-educated nurses if CGFNS and the BRN find anything lacking in his transcript. Most of the foreign-educated nurses at my hospital in Seattle seem to be from the UK/Ireland/Australia/New Zealand, or from the Philippines or India. There are quite a lot of them, from before retrogression or who got visas in other ways. (We have a lot of African nurses too, but most of them went to nursing school in the US.) You definitely won't be alone or even particularly unusual as a foreign-educated nurse.