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Managing Diversity Activity 2
Activity 2: Foreign And Immigrant Doctors And Nurses As Key Assets During The Covid-19 Pandemic
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- Time frame: Approximately 30 Minutes
- Setting: Online or face-to-face
- Source: Chapter 5 Socioeconomic Transitions: The New Realities of the Global Workforce
from Managing Diversity, Fifth Edition by Michalle E. Mor Barak - Learning Objective:
- Identify trends and impact of worker migration.
Worker Migration
The Example
The COVID-19 pandemic placed the health care systems in countries around the world under intense pressure, accentuating the already existing shortage of medical personnel in many countries and highlighting the role of foreign and immigrant doctors and nurses (OECD, 2020b). Different countries reacted with different policies—some relaxing rigid rules while others kept them in place. At the same time, the movement of medical personal from poorer countries to more affluent countries exacerbated the shortage in the sending countries.
In the United Kingdom, the Brexit vote in 2016 contributed to the loss of thousands of nurses from European Union countries. The pandemic affected British recruiters’ ability to tap countries such as the Philippines. Monica Felix, a nurse who arrived in the United Kingdom in the early days of the pandemic, on March 24, 2020, received her visa a day before the Philippine government announced a lockdown of Manila. In an interview, she told the reporters “We’re all anxious about what’s happening around us. All of us know the possible consequences if we get this kind of dreaded disease” (Einhorn et al., 2020).
In the United States, increasingly severe immigration laws during President Trump’s administration created difficulties for hospitals in filling in the shortage of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic and the urgent need of hospitals for nursing staff. Mary1, a surgical nurse in Manila, waited for more than two years to be awarded a work visa to the United States. Her salary of about 30,000 pesos ($590) a month in the Philippines was not enough to support her family. She had an offer to work at a U.S. hospital since 2018, but she has encountered bureaucratic barriers with requests for submitting additional paperwork since first submitting her application.
Australia, which similarly suffered a severe shortage in nursing staff, reacted differently by easing licensing rules to get more health care workers into the system quickly during the pandemic. Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the government’s actions in relaxing work restrictions for 20,000 international nursing students.
Facing its own reality of nursing shortages, the Philippines government’s Labour Secretary Silvestre Bello issued an order to regulate the work of his country’s nursing staff overseas. Some hospitals are offering perks such as free lodging and training programs. Yet, these efforts to keep the nursing staff in the country through regulations and some limited benefits are not equal to the task of keeping nurses from leaving due to the large increases in salaries offered to nurses in countries such as the United States and Australia.
Share Your Insights
- In what ways did the coronavirus pandemic reverse the global flow of migrant workers?
- In the aftermath of the global pandemic and an economic recession, how might the healthcare industry become more diverse?
- How can policymakers can come up with a better plan to make up for the skill shortages among the native-born population?