http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003411.html
The Coming Care Drain: Nurses in the Immigration BillHealth and Medicine Everyone knows the 'brain drain,' I presume — the flight of educated professionals from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to the west. A number of the immigrants were doctors, who were in desperately short supply at a time when the U.S. population was spiking. My own family was part of that event, which admittedly must have hurt the progress of health care in India itself (though I don't know if this has ever been formally studied). And while there now are, perhaps, too many doctors in the U.S., there aren't enough nurses. According to one statistic in today's New York Times, there were 118,000 nursing vacancies in U.S. hospitals last month, and the deficit could reach as high as 800,000 in the next decade. Now the U.S. Senate's immigration bill contains a clause that will remove the immigration cap entirely for qualified nurses from India, the Philippines, and China. The lack of qualified U.S. nurses is due mainly to the lack of places to train them; nursing schools turn away scores of applicants since there simply aren't enough Professors of Nursing around. But despite the severe shortage, the American Nurses Association is opposed to the current measure, which it calls "outsourcing." The repercussions on the health care systems of the affected countries could be severe, even if there is some overall benefit to the local economy: The flight of nurses from the Philippines, a former American colony, has provided a huge boost to a weak economy, through remittances. Some government agencies there have encouraged the export of nurses, who send home billions of dollars each year to their families. A nurse in the Philippines would earn a starting salary of less than $2,000 a year compared with at least $36,000 a year in the United States, said Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a medical professor at the University of the Philippines who led the country's National Institutes of Health. He said the flight of nurses had had a corrosive effect on health care. Most Filipinos died without medical attention in 2003, just as they had three decades earlier. (link) For the Philippines, there's already a care drain. The same may be in store for India if this bill passes and goes through the House, as seems likely. Incidentally, there is already a recruiting company, called RNIndia, that specializes in bringing Indian nurses to U.S. hospitals. And Abhi talked about another side of this issue here. -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Frederick 'FN' Noronha | Yahoomessenger: fredericknoronha http://fn.goa-india.org | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Independent Journalist | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9822122436 ---------------------------------------------------------- Photographs from Goa: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/popular-views/ _____________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. Goanet mailing list (Goanet@goanet.org)