Leslie Stahl Shills for Foreign Nurses

Date: Monday, January 20, 2003 9:38 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Leslie Stahl definitely learned something from all the angry feedback
she received from high tech-workers that are being replaced by H-1Bs:
she learned that what the US needs are H-1B nurses, and lot's of them.

Stahl treats us to the usual anecdotal stories of vast workers
shortages. She then calls CoreMedical a "nurse recruitment company"
even though it's nothing more than a bodyshop that imports nurses from
English-speaking countries like Ireland, India and the Philippines.
They promise to get these H-1B nurses a green card if they work as low
cost hospital grunts for two years. This is the same carrot and stick
approach that is used for foreign high-tech workers.

It gets worse. Stahl goes on to say that "the best and the brightest"
nurses are being lured to the US. We heard her use this same phrase
when she was shilling for IIT (Bombay University).

Stahl described the terrible working conditions of hospital nurses and
even mentioned that low salaries discourage Americans from taking these
jobs. In typical fashion she didn't make the connection that foreign
nurses are driving the salaries low. This is an astonishing gaffe since
she said that South African nurses can earn 5 times their salary of
$5-7k by coming to the U.S.

Hopefully Stahl will soon do a report on the shortage of journalists
that have the ethics to report objective news. Surely there must be
some foreign journalists that could be brought here to do a better job
than Stahl without demanding the her exorbitant salaries.

This newsletter is being sent to Stahl at LesleyStahl@cbsnews.com.
Perhaps it will inspire her to write a story about our dire shortage of
teachers.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/17/60minutes/main536999.shtml

Nursing Shortage In Critical Stage Jan. 17, 2003

American hospitals are in a serious crisis, from large numbers of
uninsured patients to spiraling costs, from outlandishly expensive
prescription drugs to a severe and dangerous shortage of nurses, a
shortage that can best be summed up by the fact that there are now over
120,000 open positions for registered nurses nationwide.

If that sounds like just another statistic, think about this: Emergency
rooms are shutting down, surgeries are delayed and, most disturbing of
all, patients are sometimes not getting the critical care they
desperately need. Lesley Stahl reports.

How worried should a patient be when he pushes that little button for
the nurse and she doesn't show up for a half-hour?

I think you should be worried, says Joyce Thompson, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing.

A new Harvard-Vanderbilt study of thousands of hospital records
confirms a direct link between a lack of nurses and potentially fatal
patient complications.

Hospitals aren't run by physicians, she says. Hospitals are only
successful if nurses are there. A physician can cut you up, he can put
you back together, but if you don't have that nurse who's following up,
who's helping you to understand what is the impact of this particular
condition on you, then the hospital falls apart.

Hospitals have struggled to attract more nurses, but working conditions
keep getting tougher. Nurses frequently have to work double shifts, and
new insurance rules, under which only the sickest people are treated in
hospitals these days, mean that each of the patients requires much more
care and attention.

Nurses like Laurel Leclaire say the pace has become relentless: It's
very stressful. This isn't - we're not shuffling papers. These are
patients' lives, I mean. And we make one little mistake, and it
could--it could harm the patient. The pressure is much higher than it
used to be, she says.

Stahl found Laurel working a 12-hour shift on the cardiac floor at New
York's Montefiore Hospital. She was very busy.

Laurel's patient had to get blood at a specific time, and it's already
late. Because of the staff shortage, she has to find someone to bring
it to the floor ASAP. She found someone to do it, but it was hectic.

Even though the work has become more difficult, wages have not even
kept up with the cost of living.

Leclaire says she is underpaid. With my longevity, in another position
I would be making much more money.

There is a major reason for the shortage. Ever since the mid-'80s,
young people have been choosing more lucrative careers. At the same
time, the nurses we do have are getting older; the average age is now
45. Just as the baby boomers are starting to need more care, the
pipeline is running dry, and it's going to get much, much worse.

Thompson says that over the next 20 years, this country is going to be
short 400,000 nurses, unless something is done to change things.

She says we have to make nursing a more appealing choice. The societal
image is anybody can be a nurse. It's like anybody can be a teacher.
That's wrong, extremely wrong.

Hospitals have been slow to respond, and so has the government. State
legislatures have only recently begun trying to restrict the number of
hours nurses are required to work and increase the number of nurses on
each shift. And there are proposals for scholarship money and student
loans, but everything has a price tag.

We have the solutions in this country. We have to have the political
will to put the solutions in place, says Thompson. She's dismayed that
instead of spending more to attract the number of nurses we need, we
are turning outward; we have begun hiring nurses from overseas.

Armand Circharo runs CoreMedical, a nurse recruitment company. More and
more hospitals are hiring staffing companies like his to find qualified
nurses from English-speaking countries, like Ireland, India and the
Philippines.

But now Core and other companies are targeting some of the poorest
countries in the world, like South Africa, which has its own shortage.

Nicola Hopkins is a recruiter for Core. She's making the hard sell to a
group of nurses in Johannesburg. We have positions in Arizona,
California, in Florida, Georgia, wherever you're wanting to go, she
recently told a group of nurses there.

Hopkins used to be a nurse herself in South Africa, until she was
recruited to work in the States. She understands how little these women
earn. An average South African nurse makes about $5,000 to $7,000 a
year; Core offers them five times that - and a package of incentives
that overworked South African nurses find hard to turn down.

Automatically, for families, we will be sponsoring you for your green
cards because this then entitles husbands to come through with you,
Hopkins told them. We will help you find an apartment.

The pitch is 'Pack your bags, we'll do the rest.' As long as the nurse
agrees to work in an American hospital for two years, Core will offer
everything, from an airline ticket to a green card.

We encourage you to bring your family because we want you to come
across as a family unit to support one another, Hopkins told them.

The reason South African nurses are in demand is that they are so
highly trained. Because doctors are scarce there, nurses have become
more experienced at treating and diagnosing patients. Core vets these
nurses with reference checks, a battery of credential screenings and
tests in English.

Hasina Subedar, head of the South African Nursing Council, is appalled
that the United States is trying to poach nurses, and she's trying to
stop it.

She doesnt blame the nurses for taking more money. I think that
everybody wants to improve their standard of living, she says. I do,
however, blame the recruiters of First World countries, and I feel our
country's at a stage where we're trying to recover from a very, very
difficult past, and by taking our human resources, you are taking away
our future; you are taking away our ability to improve the quality of
life of people. And I think that this is something I would like to say
to American society. Think about it.

South Africa's health system is stretched to the breaking point.
Hospital waiting rooms are overflowing, partly because the country is
now in the throes of a catastrophic AIDS crisis, with the highest
number of cases in the world. According to the United Nations AIDS
Program, an estimated one in five adults is infected with HIV.

While America has just begun its active recruitment in South Africa,
other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Australia and especially
England, have already lured thousands of nurses away to alleviate their
own shortages.

Each country that has a crisis, you need to deal with it within your
country. Don't see your solutions as coming to our country and
resolving your problems, says Subedar.

What galls her is that the recruiters are going after the nurses they
can least afford to lose: The cream of the crop.

There may not be a more dramatic example of that siphoning off of the
elite than what's happening at South Africa's Cecilia Makiwane
Hospital. It sits on a hillside in the midst of a sprawling and very
poor township. Lulama Galeba, deputy director of nursing, says she has
lost almost half the nurses in this hospital.

Foreign recruiters have come here to lure away the best and the
brightest. One of the best of all is Patricia Mayaba, who worked her
way up to supervisor of pediatrics. She has just given notice after 20
years on the job.

She is leaving because of financial problems, she says, and because her
children are hungry. Her leaving will make what's already a desperate
situation at the hospital even worse. The ratio of nurses to patients
on the pediatrics ward is one nurse to 10 babies. The ratio is supposed
to be one to two.

Some wards have had to shut down completely. These rooms should be
filled with AIDS patients, Galeba says.

Hopkins says she doesnt feel guilty about recruiting: If I don't
help them and bring them across with a company that's going to keep
them happy, they're going to go somewhere else. So, no, I don't feel
guilty because if they want a better life, I'd like to try and offer
it, if I can.

But Professor Thompson is greatly disturbed by the foreign
recruitments: It's extremely unethical. It's such an egotistical,
parochial view that in the United States, we can buy anything that
exists in the world to make ourselves better. And let's not be
concerned about poor Africa. Why shouldn't we be concerned? We're a
part of this world.

Stahl asked Circharo is he thought recruiting was ethical. I'm sure
there are people there that see it that way, but, again, I don't think
that's an issue that we can afford to allow to slow us down in this
process, he said.

We have a very fragile health care system that we're trying to keep
intact, and nurses play a large role in that. They're the
single-largest population in health care. We really cannot get along
without them, and I think we're going to find that the effects of not
having nurses is going to be quite devastating. So I really don't feel
like we could look at a problem like that and allow it to stop us.

In October 2002, a study from the University of Pennsylvania showed
that for the first time, there's a direct link between the nursing
shortage and an increase of patient deaths.

)MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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