Nursing News:
New federal credentialing guidelines target foreign healthcare workers

by ALFONSO CHARDY
Hospitals in South Florida and across the country are facing new federal rules for foreign nurses that will likely make it more difficult to hire workers overseas. The guidelines, scheduled to go into effect this September, will affect foreign healthcare workers seeking temporary visas.
Under the new rules, a nurse will have to get a certificate from an approved credentialing association proving the completion of health training before being allowed into the United States. Before, they needed only to have valid licenses from their homelands.
Those nurses already in the United States on temporary visas will be given a year to get certified. If not, they will not be allowed to reenter the country should they leave for whatever reason. Foreign nurses, particularly those from Canada, Mexico or the Philippines, have helped alleviate a nationwide nursing shortage, and some hospital officials believe that the rule change will make it more difficult to recruit healthcare workers.
³We are looking into this and trying to assess how it will affect us,² said Anne Streeter, assistant vice president for Baptist Health South Florida in Miami-Dade. ³We don't expect,² she said, ³that it will have a tremendous impact, though it may delay the certification of some of our nurses, particularly from Canada.² At Jackson Memorial Hospital, 20 percent of the 3,000 nurses are foreign trained, according to spokeswoman Conchita Ruíz-Topinka.
In addition, about 126,000 nursing jobs have gone unfilled nationwide, said Cheryl Peterson, senior policy analyst for the American Nurses Association in Washington, D.C. Sarah Tobocman, an attorney at Gunster Yoakley & Stewart in Miami who handles foreign healthcare-worker cases, said some industry officials were worried that foreign nurses who already have temporary visas might not learn about the new requirement and may get stuck at the border trying to get back into the United States. ³It is very important that healthcare facilities become informed and inform their recruiters and foreign nurses already employed in the United States,² Tobocman said. ³It may be that a nurse from Canada will have no idea this is required, and what may happen . . . is they'll go home for a wedding and [not] have a certificate on return. Hospitals may suffer if people don't get back to work.² Ray Kendrick, administrator of human resources at Memorial Health Care System in Hollywood, said any impact ³should be buffered by the fact we have a year² to implement the new rules.
Peterson, meanwhile, estimated that 3 to 4 percent of the 2.7 million nurses in the United States were foreign nationals on permanent or temporary visas. Her organization, she added, did not have a breakdown of temporary and permanent workers.
Foreign healthcare workers with permanent visas will not be affected by the rule change since they're already required to have such certificates. The new requirement also applies to audiologists, occupational and physical therapists, medical technicians and technologists, physician assistants and speech and language pathologists.
Reprinted with permission of the Miami Herald.