By JOSEPH KELLARD
Medical professors from the U.S. taught Molly George while she was in college in India during the early 1980s, and there she met and interacted with many American exchange students.
"Also, many of my relatives and friends are here in America," George, 45, added when asked why she came from Kerala, in southern India, to work as a nurse at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside in October 2005. "So I just wanted to have a feel of this country."
Fellow registered nurse Anju Aniyan, a 26-year-old from Mumbai who arrived at South Nassau two months after George, was also inspired to come to America through the educational system back home. "You read your books in school and get to know that country, and you want to be in the country to experience it," Aniyan said. " Š And, of course, you have a better lifestyle here."
Both George and Aniyan will move into South Nassau's new $5 million, 22-unit staff apartment complex that the hospital wants to fill with nurses, whose numbers in hospitals are dwindling worldwide. Moreover, South Nassau seeks to recruit nurses from India and the Philippines.
The hospital set up both George and Aniyan in living accommodations in neighboring houses and apartments it owns or rents for its staff. South Nassau and Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola are among the facilities that provide their staffs with housing.
"We knew South Nassau was providing accommodations, so we were very relieved to come and stay there," said George, whose husband, a hospital administrator, will remain in India until their three children finish their schooling.
Yvette Mooney, South Nassau's senior vice president for patient care services, who interviews all international applicants for nursing positions, said that when nurses come to New York they are often surprised by the high cost of living and have difficulty finding reasonably priced housing. "Ergo, that's one of the reasons for our new housing project," Mooney said.
Of course, the allure for nurses to come to the U.S. is the salaries. While the average base salary for nurses in the Philippines and India is $2,000 a year or less, the base salary for nurses at South Nassau is $58,500. For South Nassau, where the nursing staff is composed of 20 percent foreign-born employees, nurses from the Philippines and India are desirable because those countries are known to provide well-trained nurses who speak English, Mooney said. "We've found that nurses translate very well here from India," she said. " Š And the nurses we are bringing in internationally are very much traditional nurses with traditional values, and we find that all over the world."
The Philippines lead the world in supplying health care workers, from nurses to doctors. It is estimated that about 100,000 nurses have left the Philippines since 1994 to work abroad, mostly due to the comparatively low pay and poor working conditions in their homeland. According to immigration system experts, 12,000 to 14,000 nurses immigrate to the U.S. annually on employment visas, but must pass English and U.S. nursing exams to qualify for visas and green cards.
Dr. Bernadette Curry, the dean of nursing at Molloy College, who has been in the field for 40 years, said that some hospitals find the amount of resources they must devote to attracting foreign nurses, from identifying competent nurses to bringing them to the states, is not necessarily cost-effective for their immediate circumstances.
"That's not to say, in this age of outsourcing and insourcing, that hospitals can't design a well-crafted, long-range plan to incorporate more foreigners to their nursing staff," Curry was quick to add.
Mooney talked as if South Nassau is one such hospital. She said the facility¹s strategic recruiting plan began in 2001, when it projected the number of nurses it could recruit from the area based, in part, on local colleges: Molloy, Adelphi, Nassau Community College and Farmingdale, which feed nurses to more than 25 local hospitals.
With nurse recruiting, Mooney said, South Nassau does an annual projection, projecting three years out and revising its projections every six months, since turnover can change. Mooney said that South Nassau almost never has full-time vacancies in nursing. "You factored in the ages of nurses now and at what age could we estimate they would be retiring, and the turnover in current vacancies," she explained.
Among the factors Mooney cited as part of the hospital's long-term recruitment plan is that the majority of bedside nurses in the U.S. are baby boomers, with an average age of 47, and that studies indicate that most of these nurses will retire by 2010. According to the federal government, the nationwide shortfall in nursing is expected to reach 800,000 by 2020, a figure disputed by others.
Mooney stressed that local recruiting as South Nassau "has been as aggressive as it's ever been, and we intend to keep it that way," noting that the hospital has an internship program for local nurses and a close affiliation with local colleges to get new grads to choose South Nassau. "This isn't just about international recruiting ‹ it's a total mission and strategic goals to take care of our community, however we need to do that best," she said.
On the other hand, the Manhasset-based North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, with a network of 15 hospitals across Long Island, Queens and Staten Island and 10,500 nurses, does no foreign recruitment. "We would much rather spend our dollars and resources on training people that are in our local area," said Sue Shelvin, North Shore-LIJ's assistant vice president of talent acquisition. "... My guess is that it would be the same dollar value doing foreign recruitment, but we've chosen to use our resources here."
Among other factors that play into North Shore-LIJ's hiring focus on domestic nurses, Shelvin said, is its ability to use Long Island's many nursing schools to hire staff, which helps it maintain a low vacancy rate for nurses, 5 percent. "And there are plenty of people who want to go into nursing careers," she said. "I think sometimes the problem is you don't have enough faculty."
In part two the series will examine such issues as the faculty shortage in nursing schools and the ethics of hiring nurses from poorer nations.
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 287.
