Letter to Editor: Response to the topic “Nursing Shortage: A Comparative Analysisâ€
Abstract
Dear editor:
I am writing this letter in response to article “Nursing Shortage: A Comparative Analysis†which made me think about the similar situation of my country. I am from Nepal, a developing country which is facing the nursing shortage as you have mentioned in the article. If you ask a nursing student in my country, what are you going to do after graduating? Most of those answers would be going abroad for bachelor or masters. Here, doing bachelor or masters means they want to get blended with the students of the respective country for licensure and degree equivalence so that they could easily get a permanent visa of that country. As you have mentioned in your article about Philippines that they are educating more nurses than they need, we have a same situation in my country too.
The number of nursing college is increasing so is the number of nurses. There is less demand and more supply of nurses to the health care system. Another major problem we are facing is due to political instability, the governing bodies are malfunctioning which affects the quality of education provided to our nurses, resulting in quality of care they provide to their patients.
The real problem actually starts after graduation. Nurses are not able to find jobs. They are asked about their experience, which new nurses would not have. Nowadays there is a trend of volunteering by nurses, which are forced by hospital administrations so that the nurses could get a job in that hospital. Poor Nurses could only see their option of moving abroad and have a better life.
The most important reason of moving to develop countries is the money. Nepalese nurses hardly make
$250 a month, which makes you difficult to survive in the country. Even if you have a bachelor or masters de-
gree you would be making about $300 comparing the USA nurse making $60, 000 a year. This situation makes the nurses in my country very motivated and they want to try everything possible to go to developed countries and have a fascinated lifestyle.
The Copyright Notice entered below will appear in About the Journal and in each published item's metadata. While it is up to the journal to determine the nature of its copyright agreement with authors, the Public Knowledge Project recommends the use of the CREATIVE COMMONS license. To that end, it provides SAMPLE COPYRIGHT NOTICE WORDING that can be cut and pasted into the space below for journals that (a) offer open access, (b) offer delayed open access, or (c) do not offer open access.
