Public Health Secretary Joseph Kevin Villagomez said the Commonwealth Health Center has 187 nurses and 80 percent of them are foreign nationals, mostly from the Philippines.
“A lot of these nurses, too, would have plans. If we don’t come out with a more sustainable and definite answer to what we’re going to do past Nov. 2011, they are going elsewhere. My biggest fear is that we would lose very good nurses and, of course, our health care system would be majorly compromised,” Villagomez told the Variety.
A significant number of the nurses are classified as registered nurses and the rest are licensed practical nurses.
Villagomez said they cannot apply an H1 visa for these foreign nurses because the commonwealth must first declare that it recognizes obtaining a four-year U.S. bachelor of nursing degree as a requirement for CHC nurses.
Villagomez said CHC’s only feasible option to keep the foreign nurses in the CNMI is through the yet to be finalized regulations for the commonwealth worker, or CW, visa which the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services is still working on.
“Unfortunately, like everybody else, both private and government sectors, we are anxiously awaiting the regulations that will come out, especially as it pertains to the commonwealth-only visa. Right now, the only way for us to keep our foreign medical personnel after Nov. 2011, especially the Filipino nurses, and the auxiliary care personnel like the respiratory tech, the radiology tech, the lab tech, is through the CW visa,” he said.
“The H1B does not apply to the nurses we have on board,” he added.
He said this problem will have an impact on the local nursing program because the graduates cannot be hired as nurses.
“To require something that we cannot produce locally is like shooting ourselves on the foot. How can then we encourage people to go to nursing school here when we cannot hire them as nurses? They have to get a bachelor’s and for most of them, they have to go off-island,” he said.
He also noted that the federal certifications that the foreign nurses passed like the CGFNS and NCLEX will not matter due to conflict with the CNMI’s current medical policies.
“It doesn’t matter because the commonwealth needs to state that we are only recognizing the four-year degree so that means we’re excluding everybody else even if they pass the NCLEX,” he said.
He added, “Hopefully, we can have an opportunity to sit down and work this out with the U.S. immigration.”
