Ladislava Vanek worked as an operating- room nurse in the Czech Republic, but her limited mastery of English led to a job as a receptionist in America.
Vanek took English courses, stayed home with her kids and tried to improve her language skills by talking with neighbors. She learned enough to navigate the working world, but her English still wasn’t adequate for a return to nursing.
Finally, Vanek enrolled in a program designed to prepare foreign nurses to pass the U.S. nursing exam at Workplace Language Programs Career College in Centennial. She recently graduated and is now a licensed practical nurse.
“It wasn’t easy,” she said of her transition.
Similar schools are springing up all over the country as the United States struggles with a nursing shortage that is expected to get worse as baby boomers retire, said Peter Buerhaus, a Vanderbilt University professor of nursing whose research helped call attention to the nationwide nursing shortage.
The national job-vacancy rate for nurses was 8.5 percent in 2006, with about 118,000 unfilled registered-nurse positions, according to an American Hospital Association survey. The shortage of registered nurses is expected to increase to 340,000 by 2020.
While hospitals and other health providers have raised salaries to lure more nurses, nursing colleges are turning away 140,000 prospective students a year because they don’t have enough space or instructors to accommodate them.
“The bulk of our workforce in nursing is baby boomers, so we are going to have growing demand and shrinking supply and the nurses we have left are going to be substantially older than they are today,” Buerhaus said.
Enter schools like Workplace Language Programs Career College, founded by language teacher Jeanette Castillo.
The company works with the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools to determine what type of certification nurses had in their home countries and how that compares to U.S. requirements.
Castillo’s program helps the foreign nurses develop English proficiency, tamp down accents that can be a barrier to communication, learn critical-thinking skills and upgrade their nursing skills.
“They come from different parts of the world. When they first come here, they have a lot to learn,” Castillo said.
Castillo began the nursing program three years ago when the city and county of Denver chose her to put together a language and nursing program for immigrants who already had experience in the field. Her company was teaching Spanish to employees at Denver International Airport at the time, she said.
About a dozen students are now enrolled in the nursing school, all sponsored by county workforce centers, which pay the $5,000 tuition and other fees.
The school checks to make sure that students are in the country legally, said Joy K. Shaw, a nursing instructor.
The adjustment from being a public- health nurse in Chihuahua, Mexico, to working outside her profession in the U.S. was difficult, said Claudia Rodriguez, a student in the program.
“I worked in restaurants, hotels,” she said.
“I feel better because I feel that I can do it,” Rodriguez said of returning to her field.
Though Vanek and Rodriguez had been in the U.S. for years, nurses from the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Latin America and elsewhere have been coming in droves to take up the profession here, where pay is better and jobs plentiful.
Many foreign nurses are recruited to work in the U.S., and some come here on temporary work visas. The recruitment has resulted in nursing shortages in some developing countries, Buerhaus said.
At one time, only 3,000 or so foreign nurses entered the field annually in the U.S., Buerhaus said. But in 2002, 42,000 foreign nurses came into the country. They accounted for almost half the job growth in the nursing field that year.
In 2006, 39,000 new nursing jobs were filled by foreign-born people, compared with 36,000 U.S. citizens taking the jobs.
“In the last five or six years, we have had an explosion of foreign-born nurses,” Buerhaus said. “A little more than a third of the total employment growth in the last five years has come from foreign-born nurses.”
Schools like Castillo’s serve an important function by assuring that nurses meet certain standards, he said.
But passing a test doesn’t guarantee they can deliver the level of care required at American health institutions, he added.
“We don’t really know the overall quality of care provided by foreign-born nurses; there is no research out there one way or another,” Buerhaus said. “This is sort of a screening. At least these firms – they are making a profit, no doubt – but at least they are doing something to improve the quality of nurses.”
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
BY THE NUMBERS
8.5%
Unfilled registered-nurse jobs nationwide in 2006, approximately 118,000
340,000
Projected shortage of registered nurses in 2020
39,000
Jobs filled by foreign-born nurses in 2006; 36,000 were filled by U.S. citizens
42,000
Foreign-born nurses taking U.S. jobs in 2002
Source: American Hospital Association
