Post-Katrina conditions hurt recruiting in U.S

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area hospitals have increased wages to capture a share of the local talent pool and in some cases have left beds empty for want of caregivers.

Several hospitals are now looking abroad for help. Facing competition for nurses in the tight local market, East Jefferson General Hospital dispatched its chief operating officer in August to the Philippines, a former U.S. territory that annually sends thousands of English-speaking nurses overseas.

Sixty-one Filipino nurses have agreed to work for significantly increased wages in a struggling foreign city. The immigration process is arduous, however, involving a visa application, background check and a nursing certification exam, and some of East Jefferson’s newest workers will not arrive for six months to a year.

Filipino nurses were brought to other local hospitals, including Ochsner Medical Center, during a nursing drought in the 1980s. Today, Ochsner, as well as Children’s Hospital and possibly others, are seeking foreigners to help plug the increasing skills gap that has hobbled the medical community since Katrina. The Louisiana State Board of Nursing have indicated that almost 5000 nurses changed the address on their license in the 10 months after Katrina, and almost half of them moved out of state.

The shortage is not new to Louisiana or to the country as a whole. Janice Kishner, the chief operating officer and nurse executive at East Jefferson, said the profession has struggled to meet demand since the feminist revolution opened many other career paths to women beginning in the 1960s. Health-care delivery has also changed, as the advent of specialty-care clinics has drained nurses from their conventional berth at hospitals.