I found the topic of the role of
Filipinos to U.S. nursing from the book and class discussion to be interesting.
I found an article discussing the U.S. nurse labor market, which addresses the
role of immigration, more specifically Filipino immigration. The article,
written by Linda Aiken in 2007, shared that approximately 8 percent of roughly
3 million (in 2004) U.S. nurses were foreign educated. I thought this percentage
was relatively low at first; I expected the number to be around 15 to 20
percent. With that said, I know there are plenty of universities full of
nursing majors in the U.S.; I went to one in Iowa. Students of these programs
earn thousands of degrees each year, which add up to U.S. maintaining half of
the world’s stock of English-speaking nurses. These figures make it reasonable
to see the relatively low number of
U.S.-foreign educated nurses. The Philippines, which accounts for 30 percent of
U.S. foreign-educated nurses, is denoted as the major source country for RNs.
Furthermore, nurse immigration to the U.S. tripled from 1994 to 2007. Aiken
lists two factors to explain this growth: changes in the demand for nurses in
the hospital sector and changes in immigration policy. The first change was the
inclusion of foreign nurses in the H-1A visa for temporary employment (1995).
The second change was the addition of an INS screening program for
foreign-educated nurses to offer permanent residence through employment.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=ad8c80ee-5034-4f73-8ee8-5afeb26b2b4a%40sessionmgr14&vid=7&hid=127
Your posting answers a lot of my questions that I had about foreign born RN's. I also found the class discussion to be very interesting but I wasn't sure how the process worked in order to ensure that the nurses were trained in ways that met U.S. policies- I guess I had this idea that they had to take classes or do training specifically geared towards nursing in the U.S. in order to work in the U.S. hospitals. But H-1A visas INS screening program thankfully busts those myths for me. Nice article!
ReplyDeleteI found what you said in class and this post to be really fascinating, because it is something I have wondered about and this helped to answer a lot of the questions thatI had on the subject.
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