The U.S is seeing an influx of around 1,000 nurses a month from Africa, the Caribbean and the Philippines, said Sinead Carbery, president of recruiting firm O’Grady Peyton International. There are also 10,000 nurses worldwide waiting on visas after receiving job offers in the U.S.
The increase in migrant nurses has prompted concerns about the ethics of international recruiting.
“The high, high risk is that you are recruiting nurses from countries that can least afford to lose their nurses,” said Howard Catton, chief executive of the International Council of Nurses.
Lillian Mwape, director of nursing at a hospital in Zambia, told the Times her hospital is hurting from the loss of staff to countries where they will bepaid more.
“It is the most-skilled nurses that we lose and you can’t replace them. Now in the ICU we might have four or five trained critical-care nurses, where we should have 20,” she said.
