Preparing the Filipino Nurses bound for the U.S. hospitals: A Baseline Information

Preparing for the Filipino Nurses bound for the US hospitals is the most challenging issues for the nursing educators simply because there are not enough materials to be used for teaching the nursing students. Let alone researchers need to be very creative and selective in retrieving the materials from the internet and from the direct sources of the US Department of Education. Even if we have gathered the right materials, a lot of work needs to be done in order to adapt this gathered information and fit into the nursing curriculum which will be taught to all nursing students in colleges and universities in the Philippines. Part of this adaptation are some information related to the current rapidly changing US demographics as the US population quickly moves towards linguistic diversity. This information is vital to the curriculum being designed so that the Filipino Nurses would be properly informed on them. There are important issues which have affected the Filipino nurses who were already employed in the US. Consequently, miscommunication occurred between the American patients and the Filipino nurses as cited in the Background information of this article. The current program would include some of these misconceptions in order to avoid similar problem in the future once these Filipino nurses are fully trained.

The respondents included the 34 nursing fourth year students from St. John College of Nursing in Dumaguete who were selected in a purposive sampling. The instruments used in the preparation of these Filipino nurses are: 1) The communication needs of the students versus the hospital language of the US; 2) the application of the published materials of Bessent (1997) and the 25 Articles for ESL; 3). The classroom review of the Nursing Fundamentals & Commonalities & Practices; 4) Laboratory practices using the ESL approach; 5) English Language of the US hospital immersion; 6) and the NCLEX Examination simulator to assess the validity & reliability of all the instruments. The findings of the study revealed that the preparation made for Filipino Nurses was adequate for them to be work-ready for US hospital.