Charity Helps Immigrants Re-Enter Field of Health Care

Like any nurse, Maia Shur can start an IV and dress a wound. But she brought another important

skill when she started working at the Brookline Health Care Center, a nursing home just outside of Boston: the ability to speak Russian.

For the sizable number of Russian-speaking residents at the center, it meant they had someone they could communicate with when a translator wasn’t available.

“They were suffering because they couldn’t explain their problems,” says Ms. Shur. “Everybody was very happy when I got there.”

Ms. Shur learned to speak Russian in her native Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union, and earned her nursing degree and attended medical school there for three years. In 2002, she and her family moved to the United States.

But trying to become licensed in the United States was a “painful experience,” Ms. Shur says, before she sought assistance from the Welcome Back Initiative. The nonprofit group — which has programs in Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco — has helped nearly 1,000 immigrants re-enter health-care professions since its founding in 2002.

Of those, more than one-third have been nurses. While the California programs help participants re-enter a wide variety of health professions, the Boston program has chosen to focus specifically on nurses.

“It’s a program that works with immigrants who were trained in health in their countries of origin and came to the U.S. and ended up driving taxis and working at McDonald’s,” says José Ramón Fernández-Peña, a doctor from Mexico and founder of the Welcome Back Initiative. “We assist them in the process of finding their way back into the health workplace where they belong.”

Papers and Courses

The process isn’t easy. Applicants usually need to ask the institution they attended to send their transcripts and credentials, translated into English, to licensing boards, often in a specialized format. Many times, foreign-trained health professionals need to take additional courses to meet educational requirements, and they have to relearn medical terminology, this time in English, before they take licensing exams.

For Ms. Shur, Welcome Back’s Boston branch assisted her in getting the right documents to the right agencies and finding a school where she could take the two courses she needed to fulfill the state’s education requirements.

The Boston center is working with nurses from more than 80 countries. Almost a quarter hail from Haiti — more than any other country, followed by China and Brazil. Significant numbers also come from Eastern European and African nations.

The coalition of community colleges that started the Boston center chose to focus on nursing because of the critical and growing shortage of nurses. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that by 2020 the healthcare industry’s need for registered nurses nationwide will exceed the number available by about 1 million.

But while the nursing shortage has garnered public attention, other shortages are less well-known.

“There are lots of shortages of other allied health professionals, in particular radiologists, folks who are using technology to do mammograms or CAT scans,” says Ignatius Bau, a program director at the California Endowment, in Los Angeles. “When you get your blood drawn, somebody has to actually analyze that and look at it, and there are less and less of those folks.”

As part of the California Endowment’s effort to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the health-care work force, the foundation has awarded grants totaling nearly $8.5-million since 2001 to develop Welcome Back centers in the state.

Rejected Transcripts

Many participants struggle to get transcripts from their alma maters, especially health workers who fled fighting or political persecution in their home countries, says Daniel M. Lam, executive director of the Boston Welcome Back Center for Internationally Educated Nurses.

Even a small problem with the documents can disqualify them, forcing participants to request that another copy be sent, says Mr. Lam.

He says it is not unusual for officials at American institutions to reject transcripts that list the student’s birth date in day-month order (12-6 standing for June 12) rather than the standard used in America of month-day (12-6 standing for December 6).

While Welcome Back can assist with those obstacles, others are harder to overcome, like the long waiting lists for admission to many nursing schools.

José Eduardo, a former nurse in Mexico City, says it took him several years to get into the psychiatric nursing course he needed after moving to San Jose, Calif. Having recently completed the class, he hopes to take the state licensing exam soon.

Dr. Fernández-Peña, the program’s founder, can sympathize with the challenges that participants face.

The Welcome Back Initiative grew out of his experience as a physician who emigrated from Mexico in the mid 1980s. Dr. Fernández-Peña did not end up practicing medicine in the United States, but instead became an associate professor of health education at San Francisco State University.

“When I came, it was in the dark ages before the Internet and before cellphones, so finding out what was the correct process to go through was not entirely clear to me,” he says. “There was not a centralized entity where one could go and ask questions.”

Even today, it is not possible for everyone to return to their original profession, either because it has been too long since they practiced in their field or because of differences in education systems, says Dr. Fernández-Peña. In those cases, he says, the Welcome Back Initiative tries to help participants find other health-care jobs. A physician, for example, might consider work in a research lab or as a medical translator.

“Our program assists participants meet the U.S. standards for practice,” he says. “We don’t look for shortcuts. We don’t look for special favors.”

For those participants who are successful, returning to health care can give them a new lease on life in their adopted country.

In August Ms. Shur moved to a job as a full-time nurse on a rehabilitation floor at Coolidge House, another long-term care facility in Brookline. While she enjoys her job, her dream is to one day work in a surgical unit at a hospital.

“It’s a long way to that,” she says, “but I’m working on it.”