Marlene Rosenkoetter
Augusta University, USA
Title: Challenges of Global Nurse Migration: Issues and Mediators
Biography
Biography: Marlene Rosenkoetter
Abstract
Internationally educated nurses (IENs) are RNs whose initial nursing education took place outside of the United States or in the U.S. territories (formerly termed foreign-trained or foreign-educated nurses). They represent a larger percentage of the U.S. nursing workforce in recent years, comprising 5.1 percent of RNs licensed before 2004, compared with 8.1 percent since then. The Philippines continued to dominate as the source country of the IEN workforce (50 percent), followed by Canada at nearly 12 percent. India supplied 9.6 percent and the United Kingdom provided 6 percent, with the contributions from India accelerating and surpassing those from the United Kingdom among recent licensees. Approximately one-quarter of IENs lived in California in 2008, with New York, Florida, and Texas each home to 10 to 12 percent of IENs. When migrated nurses begin employment in a new setting, they need an enculturation process and orientation to their new environment. This includes not only nursing approaches but medical interventions and an immersion in new technologies. This process should involves changes in their roles, their responsibilities, and the use as well as the structure of their time. They need to acquire new support groups and have opportunities to build their own self-esteem. This paper proposes a process to achieve these goals.