After reading less than stimulating articles on the nursing shortage, and listening the mantra of “train more, train more,” or shorten the training time period for nurses so we can push them into unsafe working conditions sooner and make it even more likely that they’ll get fed up that much faster–it’s always refreshing to find articles that show a little depth and honesty of the situation.

This is from a website about getting a nursing degree online, and this is an excerpt from an article about the wisdom of importing foreign nurses:

I know this much – the domestic workforce doesn’t seem to share the same excitement about the profession as staffing agencies. Nurses’ unions disagree with the premise that nurses from abroad will help solve the problem. Nursing organizations are voicing a deep concern that foreign nurses are not being incorporated into the unions upon entering the workforce. And this means hospitals and the like can hire foreign workers far cheaper than domestic nurses plus they don’t complain about working conditions, because it’s better than their home country. The result is a national deterioration of the nursing wage, which affects all nurses.

“There is no shortage of nurses in Massachusetts,” says David Schildmeier, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Nurses Association. “There is a shortage of nurses willing to work in hospitals under current conditions, assigned to too many patients, that is why people are leaving.”

Well of course staffing agencies support importing nurses–the poorer the home country the better. They make a bundle from the hospital and in fact, an entire industry has developed around recruiting nurses and passing them around the globe.

And what Schildmeier says is so true. I’ve been saying it for years. And isn’t it odd, that despite all the endless hoopla about the nursing shortage, that very few facilities have stepped up to the plate and made real progress in improving their work environment. It’s as if they want nurses to quit, so that they can keep replacing them with new grads (read cheaper) and foreign help.