Thread: Thousands of foreign nurses come to US via Vermont never vis

http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=4109336&nav=4QcS

Thousands of foreign nurses come to U.S. via Vermont; never visit

MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Thousands of foreign nurses immigrate to the United States with the help of the Vermont Board of Nursing, without ever visiting the state or planning to live or work here, officials say.


The nursing board processes applications for the foreign trained nurses so they will be able to take the nationwide licensing exam and, if they pass, get a Vermont nursing license.

Once they become licensed the nurses then transfer their license to the state where they intend to work, said Nursing Board Executive Director Anita Ristau.

"Vermont is becoming a passthrough state," said Ristau. "They are applying to Vermont. They have no intention of working here."

The applicants apply through Vermont because it's faster than going through larger states, Ristau said.

"What they're telling us, what takes another state three or four months to do, we do in less than a month," she said.

The Nursing Board spends more time working on foreign applications _ 1,000 to 1,200 applications a year _ than it does on paperwork for Vermont nurses, Ristau said, although she couldn't say what the time breakdown was.

The largest number of foreign applications come from the Philippines followed by India. The office regularly processes applications from Africa, England and the islands of the Caribbean, she said.

As far as she knows, none of the foreign nurses end up working in Vermont. A spokesman for Vermont's largest hospital, Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, which is always trying to attract qualified nurses, said it had no immigrant nurses.

Most of the foreign applicants work through job recruiters who specialize in attracting foreign nurses to the United States. For the foreign nurses, the entire process can take years and involve hundreds of steps. The dealings with Vermont come near the end of the process.

"What we do is help the nurse to navigate their way through that process," said Ted Merhoff, the vice president of HCCA International of Brentwood, Tenn., an international health care recruiter that works regularly with the Vermont Nursing Board.

Foreign nurses have been immigrating to the United States for decades, but the number has increased in the last few years as the well-publicized shortage of nurses has grown. Ristau said her office had seen the number of foreign applications go up dramatically in the past two years.

"Right now in the United States hospitals are demanding nurses. Our demand is not keeping up with our supply," Merhoff said.

The phenomenon taps into the worldwide shortage of nurses and the migration of health care professionals from the Third World to the United States and other developed countries.

In 1995 the United States admitted 85,366 people as legal permanent residents who had job skills needed in the United States, such as nursing, and their dependents, said Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for the Williston office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2004 the number was 155,330.

Saucier could not break down the numbers further to determine how many of the immigrants were nurses, how many were other professions and how many were dependents.

The destinations of foreign nurses coming to the United States are New York, California, Illinois, Texas and Florida, said Kathleen Rohrbaugh, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia-based Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools.

Rohrbaugh's organization offers a worldwide predictor exam that helps determine how well foreign trained nurses will do on the U.S. nurse exam.

The organization's mission is to protect the American public by ensuring that internationally educated health care professionals are qualified to get a U.S. license and make sure health care professionals are treated well around the world, she said.

The Vermont Board of Nursing has hired a part-time worker just to keep up with the paperwork of the foreign nurses. The application fee is $150.

"It is a burden because we have to do a lot more for their application than we do for someone who graduates in this country," Ristau said.

"Even though it's not helping us, we feel we're helping the nursing shortage by endorsing these nurses," said Ristau.

When an application comes in, Ristau must first decide if the applicant was educated in a comparable program in the home country. The applicant must also meet minimum English language requirements.

"These programs do meet U.S. standards. Most of them make sure they do," Ristau said. "Their programs are very, very similar (to U.S. programs). If you look at their transcripts, it's amazing."

Once Ristau's office determines the applicant is qualified the nurse must take the national licensing exam, known as the NCLEX-RN. The test can be taken at four locations outside the United States.

But some applicants from the Philippines, for example, will travel to the U.S. Pacific territories of Guam or Saipan to take the test, said Merhoff.

U.S. trained nurses have a pass rate of 81 percent. The pass rate for foreign educated nurses is 42 percent, said Cheryl Peterson, a senior policy analyst at the American Nurses Association.

Peterson said her organization felt the hiring of foreign nurses was hindering efforts to improve nursing care both abroad and in the United States.

"We get so caught up in our nursing shortage in the United States. Our nursing shortage is nowhere near the problem it is in the countries we recruit from," said Peterson. "A lot of other governments invest so much more heavily in nurses' education and then we go and recruit them."

Domestically, the foreign nurses let hospitals avoid problems of inadequate staffing and other work-related issues by hiring from abroad, Peterson said.

"There's no incentive for the hospital to improve their working work environment," she said.

Peterson is right there is no real shortage of nurses in the United States. If this door closed it would help America's nurses and the people of the Third World.

The nurses we have are underrpaid and have poor working conditions. The state of Vermont is not doing anything for it's citizens. They are running a business that is making money for a Montpellier insider who has a lucrative job pushing paper.