“Workforce challenges” is the number one hurdle faced by healthcare organizations today, and those challenges revolve around nursing. Respondents to a recent survey stated overwhelmingly that managing repercussions from staff shortages, recruiting nurses from outside the organization, and retaining them are their most pressing concerns.
Nurses are leaving the field in catastrophic numbers. Over 610,000, with more than 10 years of experience, plan to leave the workforce by 2027. The same alarming trend is affecting those who would presumably take their place. Almost 190,000 nurses with less than 10 years of experience plan to leave, too. And, finally, over 13,000 registered, advanced, and practical nurses plan to leave or retire in the next five years.
It’s not hard to understand why. An already high-pressure and emotionally taxing job is now even more so. An analysis of more than 100 studies shows that as many as 80% of American nurses have experienced psychological distress. 100,000 left the workplace because of pandemic-driven fatigue, alone. The rates of those intending to leave the profession have risen to 20% or more annually, and hospital turnover rates are as high as 10%. More worryingly, the US health system is expected to be short by as many as 450,000 nurses by 2025.
Visa-related delays
The Immigration Act of 1990 established a family- and employer-based lottery-type visa option. These employer-based visas, or green cards, bestow permanent immigration status. They are broken into categories, including EB3, which includes nurses, teachers, IT workers, and other medical professionals. Fierce competition among organizations seeking high-demand workers also exacerbates the nursing shortage.
Frustratingly, a recent visa change delays hiring new immigrant nurses by as much as two years. Now, only nurses’ petitions that were filed before June 1, 2022, will be processed, making 2025 the earliest that new international nurses would be able to enter the country for employment.[1]
Nevertheless, some American hospitals have ramped up their own efforts to recruit international nurses.
Let the experts do the job
But should hospitals and healthcare organizations wade into the international recruiting game, or is there a better way? International recruiting includes daunting intricacies, such as the visa retrogression, newly hired nurses not passing their NCLEX, not being fully prepared to work when they arrive, and more.
Organizations who specialize in recruiting nurses from other countries are well-versed in every nuance of the process beyond simply finding them and managing the associated legalities. Shearwater Health has programs and experts in place to navigate intangibles that may overwhelm even the most well-intentioned hospital recruiters.
Consider the following calculation:
Direct cost of applications and testing fees
plus Indirect hospital cost to manage
plus Fee paid to local POEA agency *
plus Immigration bureaucracy risk *
plus Nurse passing the English proficiency exam risk *
plus Passing nurse licensure exam risk *
plus Nurses’ sustained personal interest and commitment
plus Travel cost to US
plus US housing costs
plus Transportation to locality
plus Salary, wages and benefits
plus Preceptorship *
plus Homesickness *
plus Family satisfaction in USA *
plus Retention *
plus Clinical performance risk*
Items marked as a * that result in a 0, cause the entire value returned to the immigration sponsor to be 0.
Hard costs can be assigned to some of these categories, and others can be measured in terms of time. Others are essentially incalculable because hospitals are not likely to have experienced and trained professionals in place to address “soft” factors, such as homesickness, family satisfaction, and others.
This is why it makes sense to outsource this pathway to those who focuses on global sourcing. An organization who not only helps these much-needed workers find jobs but, just as importantly, find a home. That leaves hospitals and health systems able to devote time to what they do best: managing the hospital and the recruitment of RNs on a local, regional, and national scale.
