Nurses' licensing examinations will be offered
abroad beginning in 2004, a move that is expected to bring more
foreign-born nurses to the USA and help alleviate the acute nursing
shortage that is crippling American health care.
The required test currently is given only in the USA and its territories,
which forces overseas nurses to make costly trips in order to take it. The
National Council of State Boards of Nursing decided over the weekend to start
offering the exam at overseas sites by October 2004.
Desperate U.S. hospitals are looking to hire thousands of foreign-educated
nurses to help fill more than 125,000 vacant nursing positions. Experts
predict that figure will triple in the coming decade as baby boomers demand
more health care services and fewer Americans go into nursing.
Foreign students, in turn, increasingly view nursing school as their ticket
to the United States. Add to that the advantage of taking the test in or near
their native country, and the number of test-takers is likely to soar.
More than 23,000 foreigners took the U.S. nurse licensing examination last
year, up from about 20,000 the year before.
Of those, more than half were from the Philippines, which educates thousands
more nurses than either the council nor the U.S. government keeps a tally of
how many foreign-educated nurses are licensed and working in the USA, but
anecdotal accounts abound of health care companies spending as much as
$10,000 per hire in recruiting efforts and immigration costs to fill their
vacancies.
Norton Health Care Systems in Louisville is expecting as many as 200 foreign
nurses to arrive this year to relieve a shortage of 450 nurses each year at
its seven hospitals.
Carla Luggiero of the American Hospital Association says hospitals might be
leaning too heavily on the prospect of importing labor to resolve the
shortage. ''This is not the answer,'' she says. ''It is not a silver bullet.
We have to grow more of our own (nurses).''
Passing the licensing exam -- along with two English proficiency tests --
ensures that nurses are basically competent. But nurse Irin Camay of the
Philippines acknowledges that when she arrived in the United States, she
realized she had a lot to learn about the high-tech world of American
hospitals.
''I've been working for eight years in the Philippines, and I've never seen
some of these machines,'' Camay says. ''It scared me at first.''
