After outsourcing, Obama opposes overseas nurses
Posted by graeyze on March 7, 2009
Washington: US President Barack Obama on Friday opposed the idea of inviting overseas nurses, including from India, to fill up the huge shortfall the United States is facing right now.America like most of the Western countries is faced with acute shortage of nurses and in recent years it has allowed medical personnel from India, China and Philippines to immigrate to work in hospitals.
“The notion that we would have to import nurses makes absolutely no sense,” Obama told a gathering of health experts and lawmakers at a White House meeting on health care reforms.
Instead, Obama argued that the best possible approach to meet this shortfall is to train people inside the country.
“For people who get fired up about the immigration debate and yet don’t notice that we could be training nurses right here in the United States,” he said responding to an observation made by Congresswoman Lois Capps from California.
“We have a huge shortage of nurses today. Estimates are that the US will be lacking over 500,000 nurses in the next seven years,” said Democratic lawmaker Capps.
Last week, a legislation was introduced in the US Congress to create a special category of nursing visas, which would facilitate much faster and easier brining of trained nurses from Asian countries like India. Called the “Nursing Relief Act of 2009″ the legislation proposes to make provisions for the new category of visas for registered nurses with an annual limit of 50,000.
The legislation notes that there are more vacant nursing positions in the US than there are qualified registered nurses and nursing school candidates to fill those positions. And according to the Department of Labour, the current national nursing shortage exceeds 126,000.
Obama said there are a lot of people in the US who would love to be in the nursing profession, and yet the Government is not able to providing them the resources to get them trained.
“That’s something that we’ve got to fix. That should be a no-brainer. That should be a bipartisan no-brainer, to make sure that we’ve got the best possible nursing staffs in the country,” Obama said amidst applause.
Source:
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/after-outsourcing-obama-opposes-overseas-nur…/431684/
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As I read this news, I felt sad because of course if that may happen overseas nurses will have a hard time going to US. So how’s my US dream??? I don’t know but of course US can’t produce many nurses in a short period of time. I think they may still be needed some nurses outside their country to fill their shortage. I hope retrogression will be lifted so that many nurses can go to US. Here in Philippines on the other hand has an oversupply of nurses, grrrr, I can’t find a hospital job because almost all the hospitals here especially the known ones are freeze hiring. Maybe I should really try Saudi haha,,,
Nilka Batista de Ayuso said
Dear Readers,
First, I am a RN graduated from a Nursing School in the USA, and I think that is a very good idea for President Obama to help US residents to go back to college, but he has to be realistic about some facts, during my training approximately 50% of the US resident left nursing school because it was to difficult to deal with the stress and their life, or some of them could not understand the science of nursing. On the other hand, the 100% of International Student who started the program graduated on the stipulated time, and passed the NCLEX without problems. Lets be clear, for the US resident is easy to get any job anywhere, why do they have to go through the HARD WORK of Nursing School when they can get any job they want.
Furthermore, I had work extra hard to save some money so I can pay for my BSN and I could stay under my F1 status, and wait until the Government decides what to do with the thousand of Green Card application that hospitals and other company have filled for their international Nurses.
Lastly, while the government and the other involved institutions are trying to fixed the shortage of nursing, the solution to this problem is already on their hands,whit all those green card applications that have not been approved, but the application fees have been cashed.
I just wanted to give my opinion, but I have faith that soon (not six years) the approval will come, and they will realize that the International Nurses are the solution not the problem.
Thank you and have a great day!!
NBA