Strangers in a Familiar Profession

A local community college and a county government program are helping immigrants get into the same medical professions they were trained for in their own land. They need some English help and training in the system here. There is a shortage in many professions, and these immigrants are a wonderful asset. DP

By David Moltz, inside higher ed

insidehighered.com: Wendy Mejia became a labor and delivery nurse in her home country of Honduras in 1993. Five years later, after Hurricane Mitch devastated her homeland, she packed up her life and moved to the United States to be with her husband, leaving her professional career behind in Honduras. Though her husband encouraged her to seek her nurse’s license so that she could work in the area, Mejia said the process was too expensive to afford and too difficult to manage on her own.

Now, with the help of a local community college and a county government outreach program, Mejia is a newly minted nurse in surgical intensive care at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md., a suburb of Washington. Ten other foreign-trained nurses in Montgomery County, Md. are now also fully certified and finally back to work in their chosen profession. Organizers of this pilot program argue that participants, particularly Latino immigrants, are an untapped resource and can help diversify the health care workforce to meet the needs of the increasingly diverse communities it serves.

A local government report notes that 40 percent of Hispanics in the Washington metropolitan area do not speak English proficiently and nearly 30 percent live in linguistically isolated households, making hospital visits difficult and even dangerous if there are not Spanish speakers involved in patient care. Mejia, for one, said her nursing and bilingual skills are both valued at Holy Cross.

“The Spanish-speaking community is growing every day,” she said. “A lot of people understand a bit of English, but it’s not the same when it’s about their own health. The patients feel such relief that someone else is there that speaks their own language.”

Mejia is just one of the success stories from a pilot program for the licensure of foreign-trained nursing professionals started in 2006 by the Latino Health Initiative, an outreach program of the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services. The main goal of the program — which had 25 participants in its first class — was to address the severe nursing shortage in Maryland by utilizing foreign-trained professionals and helping them through the certification process, said Sonia Mora, manager of the Latino Health Initiative. Immigrants are often confused and frustrated by the multi-step process, she said, adding that without help many abandon their ambitions of returning to the nursing field.
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