Feminists blamed for nursing shortage

Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 11:35 PM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1576 -- 10/24/2006 >>>>>

According to the article below, one of the reasons there is a shortage of
nurses is that feminists shunned nursing because they went elsewhere for
better jobs. If we accept the contention that there is a nursing shortage,
and that feminism is partly responsible, then why didn't hospitals improve
the working standards of nurses to keep them there, and to entice more
people into the profession?

The shortage is not new to Louisiana or to the country as a whole.
Janice Kishner, the chief operating officer and nurse executive at
East Jefferson, said the profession has struggled to meet demand
since the feminist revolution opened many other career paths to
women beginning in the 1960s.

The answer to the question above is simple -- the medical industry doesn't
need to improve the working conditions for nurses as long as they have a
large foreign labor pool that is willing to come here to work. Filipinos
are a bargain for hospitals and they are willing to work in third world
hell holes where nobody else would -- like New Orleans.

While recruitment from the Philippines is slow, cumbersome and
expensive, Kishner estimates the hospital will save 40 percent on
labor costs with foreign nurses compared with agency nurses.

Still, they are no bargain. Filipino nurses earn about $3 a day in
their native country, but East Jefferson has promised to pay the
prevailing local wage for the New Orleans region: about $28 an
hour plus benefits. In exchange, the nurse recruits have pledged
to stay for at least three years.

H-1B is never mentioned but the use of the phrases "prevailing wages" and
"three years" gives it away.

There is a new round of shortage shouting for nurses in newspapers. I did a
search on Google news for the keywords "shortage" and "nurses" and came up
with 834 hits! This is part of the PR campaign to push the Skil bill.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/topnews/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_topnews/archives/2006_10_15.html

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Foreigners tapped to fill nursing gap
Post-storm conditions hurt recruiting in U.S.

By Kate Moran
East Jefferson bureau

Pinched for nurses since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area hospitals have
increased wages to capture a share of the local talent pool and in some
cases have left beds empty for want of caregivers.

Now, several hospitals are looking abroad for help.

Rather than scrimmage for nurses in the tight local market, East Jefferson
General Hospital dispatched its chief operating officer in August to the
Philippines, a former U.S. territory that annually sends thousands of
English-speaking nurses overseas.

Sixty-one Filipino nurses have agreed to trade in their meager wages for
life in a struggling foreign city. The immigration process is arduous,
however, involving a visa application, background check and a nursing
certification exam, and some of East Jefferson's newest workers will not
arrive for six months to a year.

Filipino nurses were brought to other local hospitals, including Ochsner
Medical Center, during a nursing drought in the 1980s. Today, Ochsner, as
well as Children's Hospital and possibly others, are seeking foreigners to
help plug the nursing outflow that has hobbled the medical community since
Katrina. The Louisiana State Board of Nursing tabulated that 4,800 nurses
changed the address on their license in the 10 months after Katrina, and
almost half of them moved out of state.

The shortage is not new to Louisiana or to the country as a whole. Janice
Kishner, the chief operating officer and nurse executive at East Jefferson,
said the profession has struggled to meet demand since the feminist
revolution opened many other career paths to women beginning in the 1960s.
Health-care delivery has also changed, as the advent of specialty-care
clinics has drained nurses from their conventional berth at hospitals.

Crunch at colleges

Kishner says there also has been a bottleneck at universities, which turn
away nursing school applicants because of a perpetual shortage of
instructors. That shortage has become more acute since Katrina, as higher
wages have helped keep veteran nurses at hospitals when they might
otherwise go into teaching.

"We could have more students if we had more faculty," said Provost Patricia
Egers of Delgado Community College, where nursing enrollment is down about
11 percent since the storm. "We used to find people at the last minute, but
the hospitals cannot help us because they are short-staffed too."

Hospitals have struggled to retain seasoned nurses and recruit new ones
from out of state as housing prices have escalated since Katrina. Many
departing nurses followed spouses to new jobs outside the region, or simply
decided that the emotional demands of caring for patients while rebuilding
their own flooded house were too much to handle.

Many hospitals replenished their depleted ranks -- East Jefferson alone
lost 800 employees, many of them nurses -- by hiring staff from damaged
hospitals that failed to reopen after Katrina. But by snapping up nurses
from other institutions, these hospitals exposed themselves to high
turnover as employers have started to reopen beds and call back their
former employees.

The mixing of staff from various hospitals sometimes resulted in a culture
clash when nurses discovered that dress codes were more stringent or
operating procedures different at their new hospital. Such changes,
combined with mandatory overtime, weekend shifts and other measures to cope
with shortage of staff, have made work particularly stressful these days.

"Hospitals are hard places to work now," Egers said. "It is very
frustrating because you go into this business to care for people, and when
you don't have time to do that, you don't feel good at the end of the day.
That loss of patient contact hurts."

Management has tried to cobble together solutions while keeping nurses
happy. Touro Infirmary created a pool of flexible nurses who shuttle among
various wards, depending on where need is greatest. Children's Hospital,
which lost about a third of its 480 nurses, has trained nurses accustomed
to treating adults in the nuances of working with children.

Traveling nurses

And almost every hospital in the area has resorted to hiring traveling
nurses, who receive premium salaries but no fringe benefits. Ochsner Health
System lost about one third of its nurses after Katrina and, at a high
point in January, was relying on 74 nurses from staffing agencies. That
number has since dropped to 30.

But nursing executives say even traveling nurses, for whom New Orleans is
usually a popular destination in the fall and winter, are discouraged from
coming here by perceptions about poor quality of life. And even when they
can be lured here, agency nurses are not exactly ideal for the hospitals.

"They are qualified people who have been through the same screening process
as our own staff," said Joan Williams, vice president for human resources
at Touro Infirmary. "The disadvantage has to do with continuity of care. We
prefer having a nurse who works here all the time and knows the system and
how to get the things she needs."

Nancy Davis, Ochsner's senior vice president and chief nursing officer,
went to a job fair in Houston six weeks ago to hire permanent staff but was
rebuffed by nurses who said they would be "nuts" to leave Texas for
post-disaster conditions in the New Orleans area. With such recruitment
challenges at home, Ochsner and at least one other local hospital are also
exploring whether to hire from abroad.

Lawanda Gordon, vice president for nursing at Children's Hospital, has been
meeting with an international agency that pulls nurses from
English-speaking countries such as Canada, Ireland, South Africa, India and
the Philippines.

Gordon said Children's Hospital lost about a third of its nurses after
Katrina. She is plugging the gaps with about 35 agency nurses but needs
twice that number to be fully staffed. "It's mind-boggling," she said.

East Jefferson likewise has beds that will remain out of commerce until
more nurses arrive. Its vacancy rate for nurses is 9 percent, up from 2
percent to 3 percent before Katrina, and Kishner has had to use agency
nurses to plug the gaps.

Big pay shift

While recruitment from the Philippines is slow, cumbersome and expensive,
Kishner estimates the hospital will save 40 percent on labor costs with
foreign nurses compared with agency nurses.

Still, they are no bargain. Filipino nurses earn about $3 a day in their
native country, but East Jefferson has promised to pay the prevailing local
wage for the New Orleans region: about $28 an hour plus benefits. In
exchange, the nurse recruits have pledged to stay for at least three years.

Before the nurses arrive, they must submit to background checks and pass a
credentialing exam required by the Commission on Graduates of Foreign
Nursing. They also must have a bachelor of science degree with an English
curriculum and pass the U.S. board certification exam.

Several among the 61 imported nurses have credentials above and beyond what
is required: They are medical doctors who will earn more here as nurses
than they would at home as physicians.

"We do not have enough nurses in the metro area to cover our needs," said
Davis, of Ochsner. "The Filipino nurses will be a good thing for the
community because they will stay. They are not coming for a year or two and
moving back home. They are looking to immigrate."

. . . . . . .

Kate Moran can be reached at kmoran@timespicayune.com or (504) 883-7052.

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