Is the current shortage of hospital nurses ending?
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Although hospitals have experienced many shortages of registered nurses (RNs), most have not lasted as long as the current shortage, which began in 1998. However, hospital RNs' employment and earnings increased sharply in 2002, which suggests that the shortage may be easing. Two-thirds of the increase in employment came from older RNs, with the remainder supplied by RNs born in other countries. The employment response of older and foreign-born RNs indicates how the labor market is likely to respond to future shortages, and it emphasizes the challenges confronting policymakers as the RN workforce ages and eventually shrinks in size. (+info)
Imported care: recruiting foreign nurses to U.S. health care facilities.
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As U.S. health care facilities struggle to fill current registered nurse staffing vacancies, a more critical nurse undersupply is predicted over the next twenty years. In response, many institutions are doubling their efforts to attract and retain nurses. To that end, foreign nurses are increasingly being sought, creating a lucrative business for new recruiting agencies both at home and abroad. This paper examines past and current foreign nurse use as a response to nurse shortages and its implications for domestic and global nurse workforce policies. (+info)
Canadian-trained nurses in North Carolina.
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Little is known about nurses who leave Canada to work in the US. The main purpose of this study is to gain some insight into the emigration component of nursing supply and demand by comparing characteristics of nurses who left Canada to nurses who stayed. Specifically, Canadian-trained RNs who work in the state of North Carolina are compared to RNs who work in Canada. Results show that there are 40% more Canadian-trained RNs in North Carolina than there are in Prince Edward Island. A higher percentage of Canadian-trained RNs in North Carolina are male, under 40 years of age, have baccalaureate training and graduated less than 10 years ago. Canadian-trained nurses in both countries have very low rates of unemployment. The loss of Canadian-trained RNs to the US is a significant problem, and there is an urgent need to obtain a better understanding of why nurses leave the country. (+info)
A snapshot of the U.S. postdoctoral pediatric dentistry faculty workforce, 2002.
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This study characterizes the faculty shortage in U.S. postdoctoral pediatric dentistry (PD) education. The objectives of the study were to determine: 1) the changes in PD faculty numbers and teaching loads between 1995 and 2002 for postdoctoral PD education, 2) current faculty age and training, and 3) distribution of faculty by age. A questionnaire was sent in 2002 to fifty-four programs, of which forty-six responded (85 percent). Dental school and residency mean class sizes increased in the seven-year study period from 82.8 to 91.8 and from 6.0 to 8.5, respectively. Full- and part-time mean faculty positions increased as did vacancies, the latter growing from 15 to 38.9 and changing during the period from 5 to 10.8 percent of available positions. About one-third of programs used general dentists to teach PD, while programs using foreign-trained educators grew from 4 to 13 percent. Twenty-nine percent of full-time and 27 percent of part-time faculty are fifty-five years or older, and young entry-level faculty, age twenty-five to twenty-nine, represent only 2 percent and 5 percent of full- and part-time faculty respectively. Faculty vacancies have increased along with numbers of students and residents, and the largest segment of PD faculty is within a decade of retirement age. (+info)
The migration of nurses: trends and policies.
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This paper examines the policy context of the rise in the international mobility and migration of nurses. It describes the profile of the migration of nurses and the policy context governing the international recruitment of nurses to five countries: Australia, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also examine the policy challenges for workforce planning and the design of health systems infrastructure. Data are derived from registries of professional nurses, censuses, interviews with key informants, case studies in source and destination countries, focus groups, and empirical modelling to examine the patterns and implications of the movement of nurses across borders. The flow of nurses to these destination countries has risen, in some cases quite substantially. Recruitment from lower-middle income countries and low-income countries, as defined by The World Bank, dominate trends in nurse migration to the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, while Norway and Australia, primarily register nurses from other high-income countries. Inadequate data systems in many countries prevent effective monitoring of these workforce flows. Policy options to manage nurse migration include: improving working conditions in both source and destination countries, instituting multilateral agreements to manage the flow more effectively, and developing compensation arrangements between source and destination countries. Recommendations for enhancements to workforce data systems are provided. (+info)
Migration of health-care workers from developing countries: strategic approaches to its management.
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Of the 175 million people (2.9% of the world's population) living outside their country of birth in 2000, 65 million were economically active. The rise in the number of people migrating is significant for many developing countries because they are losing their better-educated nationals to richer countries. Medical practitioners and nurses represent a small proportion of the highly skilled workers who migrate, but the loss for developing countries of human resources in the health sector may mean that the capacity of the health system to deliver health care equitably is significantly compromised. It is unlikely that migration will stop given the advances in global communications and the development of global labour markets in some fields, which now include nursing. The aim of this paper is to examine some key issues related to the international migration of health workers and to discuss strategic approaches to managing migration. (+info)
Data on the migration of health-care workers: sources, uses, and challenges.
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The migration of health workers within and between countries is a growing concern worldwide because of its impact on health systems in developing and developed countries alike. Policy decisions need to be made at the national, regional and international levels to manage more effectively this phenomenon, but those decisions will be effective and correctly implemented and evaluated only if they are based on adequate statistical data. Most statistics on the migration of health-care workers are neither complete nor fully comparable, and they are often underused, limited (because they often give only a broad description of the phenomena) and not as timely as required. There is also a conflict between the wide range of potential sources of data and the poor statistical evidence on the migration of health personnel. There are two major problems facing researchers who wish to provide evidence on this migration: the problems commonly faced when studying migration in general, such as definitional and comparability problems of "worker migrations" and those related to the specific movements of the health workforce. This paper presents information on the uses of statistics and those who use them, the strengths and limitations of the main data sources, and other challenges that need to be met to obtain good evidence on the migration of health workers. This paper also proposes methods to improve the collection, analysis, sharing, and use of statistics on the migration of health workers. (+info)
Plumbing the brain drain.
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Opportunity is the driving force of migration. Unsatisfied demands for higher education and skills, which have been created by the knowledge-based global economy, have generated unprecedented opportunities in knowledge-intensive service industries. These multi-trillion dollar industries include information, communication, finance, business, education and health. The leading industrialized nations are also the focal points of knowledge-intensive service industries and as such constitute centres of research and development activity that proactively draw in talented individuals worldwide through selective immigration policies, employment opportunities and targeted recruitment. Higher education is another major conduit of talent from less-developed countries to the centres of the knowledge-based global economy. Together career and educational opportunities drive "brain drain and recirculation". The departure of a large proportion of the most competent and innovative individuals from developing nations slows the achievement of the critical mass needed to generate the enabling context in which knowledge creation occurs. To favourably modify the asymmetric movement and distribution of global talent, developing countries must implement bold and creative strategies that are backed by national policies to: provide world-class educational opportunities, construct knowledge-based research and development industries, and sustainably finance the required investment for these strategies. Brazil, China and India have moved in this direction, offering world-class education in areas crucial to national development, such as biotechnology and information technology, paralleled by investments in research and development. As a result, only a small proportion of the most highly educated individuals migrate from these countries, and research and development opportunities employ national talent and even attract immigrants. (+info)