LOS ANGELES — Visa and airline ticket in hand, a Filipina nurse named Maria checked in recently for her flight from London to the United States, where a job awaited her as an intensive care nurse at a North Carolina hospital on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis.
Foreign health workers have been lining up to take jobs at American hospitals, but many are running into roadblocks. Some are having difficulty securing appointments for visas at U.S. consulates overseas that are hobbled by skeletal staffing. Others, like Maria, are running into travel restrictions imposed in the midst of the pandemic.
Governors have called on retired physicians to return to work and asked medical schools to allow students to graduate ahead of schedule. Some hospitals are offering top dollar to woo nurses from other states. “There are gaps in communication at a time when they need to pull this together quickly,” said Beth Vanderwalker, vice president of operations at WorldWide HealthStaff Solutions. “We have hundreds of nurses who we could get here in a matter of weeks.”
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, demand for registered nurses in the United States was projected to grow from 2.9 million to 3.4 million between 2016 and 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “There are easy fixes that the administration should be willing to make in the face of a national emergency,” said Ian Wagreich, an attorney in Chicago who chairs the Government Liaison Committee of the International Medical Graduate Taskforce. The committee has been pushing various government agencies to take steps that would enable more foreign doctors to assist during the pandemic.
Alur, president of Physicians for American Healthcare Access, a nonprofit association representing foreign-trained doctors working in rural or underserved areas, said there were fewer than 10 confirmed coronavirus cases in the county where he works. “We are physicians trained at top U.S. institutions,” said Kura, who has been in the United States for 19 years. “People like me are not able to go to help in hot spots even though we can manage ventilators and we can manage ICU patients.”
“Many of these workers stand ready to serve our country but are unable to do so because of a lack of flexibility in their visa categories and other limitations in our immigration system,” the letter said.
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