Japanese Nurse Volunteering in Laos

I'm currently travelling in Laos for the Christmas holiday. I met a Japanese nurse when I spent a day weaving at a vocational women's centre. She was here on a two year nursing placement working at a local hospital as a volunteer.

Many governments have opportunities for professionals like career nurses to volunteer in countries where aid is needed. Not all government given foreign aid is about money, a lot of it is about training the population.

Naomi, the nurse from Japan, had been in Vientiane, Laos for 9 months and had made many friends. She told me that she spent her time with friends that she'd made from Laos and other foreign nurses who were working at the hospital.

While she found the language difficult, she said that she was managing well and her main problem was not having enough time to fit everything in that she wanted to do...

Perhaps volunteering as an international nurse to help train trainee nurses in a developing country is a career move you'd be interested in making...

Volunteer nurses abroad

Useful Pointers To Land A Certified Nursing Assistant Job

There are obviously many different kinds of positions as a nurse that you can encounter during your career, however one of your first certified nursing assistant jobs may end up being the most memorable. Often looked at as an important rung in the ladder to a great career in the health care field, the job that gets you started can literally lay the ground work for the rest of your entire, exciting nursing career.

To begin with, taking the step to join in this field is enough to celebrate. This is quite an exciting field to enter as well as a very exciting time for the world of health care and nursing in general. Having a number of assistant jobs under your belt is a great way to show your potential employers, in the future, that you took the time to prepare yourself for a strong nursing career in the medical field.

No matter what area you are striving for within the medical and field of nurses, various certified nursing assistant jobs can give you a variety of valuable skills that you can take along with you, onward into future careers and programs. While already knowing basic care for nurses and having experience interacting with other nurses and physicians, you have a strong knowledge of the inner workings of various facilities, whether they are hospitals, a nursing care facility or even homes that you visit for hospice care.

The world of nursing is never going to go away. There will always be a need for its knowledge, for assisted living and rehabilitation. The best thing you can do is give yourself the opportunity to get started with a program or certified course in your area.

Then, you can work your way up from there to landing your first certified assistant job. Some nurses at this particular point will even look into a variety of per diem or part time positions in order to get the most experience possible in all different aspects of the field.

While you are involved with one of your first certified nursing assistant jobs, you will find that you will learn valuable skills including administration of medications, communication with the families of your patients, forming a bond with your patients to help better evaluate their situation and of course, liaison between the doctors and the patients and their relatives. The kinds of things that you can learn during your hands-on-experience with a certified assistant job, is truly priceless and can only lead you to bigger and better things in the future.

Mike Selvon's portal will expand your knowledge about certified nursing assistant jobs.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Nursing Careers in NZ for Overseas Trained Nurses

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation estimates the shortage of nurses in NZ to be around 2,000 nurses for 2007.

Move your Nursing Career to NZ quickly and easily with these clever tips and strategies!

Do I need special nursing qualifications?

Your nursing qualifications and any specialist training you have undertaken may not be the exact equivalent of what is required or offered of registered nurses in the country to which you are moving.

Most countries have a service you can use that will work out what your qualifications are equivalent to in their education system. For example, you can contact NARIC in the UK and they will check your international nursing qualifications against the UK standards and issue you a report.

Even if your qualifications do not transfer exactly, you will most likely be able to register as a general adult nurse. Once you are working in a nursing position overseas, you can explore whether you would like to upgrade your nursing qualifications by up-skilling in a new specialism.

How do I get a job nursing abroad?

Each country has their own way of registering nurses. And nurses who want to nurse abroad in the United States, Australia or Canada face the added challenge of being required to register with the State Board of Nursing relevant to where they will be working as there is no nationwide system of nurse registration.

Generally speaking, you will have to:

* provide evidence of your nursing education

* provide evidence of your nursing license in the country you are currently working in

* provide evidence of your nursing experience, usually recommendation letters on official letterhead will be accepted

* provide evidence of your fluency in the official language of the country you are applying to register in

In the UK you’ll also have to take part in an Overseas Nursing Programme, and in the USA you’ll have to take either the NCLEX-RN exam, or the CGFNS exam... or both.

Finding information on how to register as an overseas nurse can be a lengthy process as much of the information is buried deep inside websites that are not dedicated to providing information to foreign nurses. You can find detailed, step-by-step instructions to moving your nursing career abroad in the Nursing-Overseas Ultimate Job Hunting System.

Where can I get a nursing job overseas?

Most developing countries are suffering from an increasingly severe nursing shortage. They simply are not training enough nurses each year to replace the nurses that are reaching retirement age. This is an immediate problem for countries which also have an aging population who are putting more strain on the health systems in those countries.

Countries like the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand all have a significant number of internationally educated nurses already working in their health systems. And there are still many vacancies that nursing recruiters are unable to fill!

If you are already a registered nurse at home, moving your nursing career overseas to any English speaking country is only limited by your ability to speak the language well enough to pass the required English language test. Similarly, if you are a qualified nurse who is fluent in a language other than English, Arabic or Cantonese for example – there are many nursing vacancies abroad in the United Arab Emirates or Singapore.

Nursing Jobs Abroad and Disposable Income

Many factors affect your disposable income, and you need to consider them all when you are assessing a nursing employment contract.

Firstly, and probably most importantly, the cost of housing in the area where you will be nursing will have serious impact on how much money you have left at the end of the month. To find out how much accommodation will cost you - use the power of the internet. You can Google something like ‘1 bedroom apartment Albany New York’. And take a look at what is on offer with the letting agents that come up. Alternatively you can try to find the name of a local newspaper and check the classified section for ‘Apartments for Rent’.

You may find that accepting a nursing job in an area which has a low cost of housing, or one where housing is included will result in you having a higher disposable income, even if the salary figure is lower than you are being offered in other places.

The second highest expense would probably be your food bill, and the cost of food can vary drastically, even within a country. The cost of food includes your groceries that you bring home and cook for yourself, and also the food and drink that you purchase while you are out. To find out how the cost of food will affect your budget you can again use the power of the internet. Many restaurants now have internet sites and you can even check out their menu and the cost of things like their set meal.

Of course there are some exceptions to this rule. If you are only going to shop at large chain stores and eat at restaurants like McDonalds then your cost of living will be largely unaffected by your food purchases because these companies generally set one price for across the country.

Now, between countries, that’s different. You can actually use McDonalds to help you compare the cost of living between two countries. Each year economists work out the Big Mac Index which compares the cost of living in a number of countries and shows the information as how much a Big Mac costs. So the USA has a Big Mac cost of a dollar and places like Sweden have a higher Big Mac cost, but countries where it is cheap to live, like Indonesia, have a Big Mac cost of less than a dollar. It is a very rough guide to the cost of living in different countries.

Lastly, when working out your disposable income remember to use your take home pay when you work it out rather than your salary pre-tax. Unless you are nursing in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia you probably will not receive a tax free income.

Taking Cost of Living Into Account When Assessing An Overseas Nursing Contract

One of the scariest things about moving your nursing career overseas is the feeling of uncertainty when it comes to accepting a contract. Many questions go through your head, is this enough money? How much will it cost to live? Will I have enough to send home?

When looking at an employment contract for a nursing job abroad it is very easy to focus on the salary you’ll be receiving and judge the medical recruiter’s offer on that basis alone. However, should you fall into this trap you could be robbing yourself of some very attractive opportunities...

If you want to send money home, or have enough money to travel with and take advantage living in another country, then it is not the salary offered that you should be looking at when deciding if a contract is worth signing or not. What you need to be considering is the amount of money you will have left over at the end of the month, or you disposable income.


Disposable income is the difference between the income you receive in your pay packet and what you have to spend to live.

Taking Cost of Living Into Account When Assessing An Overseas Nursing Contract

One of the scariest things about moving your nursing career overseas is the feeling of uncertainty when it comes to accepting a contract. Many questions go through your head, is this enough money? How much will it cost to live? Will I have enough to send home?

When looking at an employment contract for a nursing job abroad it is very easy to focus on the salary you’ll be receiving and judge the medical recruiter’s offer on that basis alone. However, should you fall into this trap you could be robbing yourself of some very attractive opportunities...

If you want to send money home, or have enough money to travel with and take advantage living in another country, then it is not the salary offered that you should be looking at when deciding if a contract is worth signing or not. What you need to be considering is the amount of money you will have left over at the end of the month, or you disposable income.

Disposable income is the difference between the income you receive in your pay packet and what you have to spend to live.

There are three visa options for nurses who want to work in the US.

The USA is experiencing an acute shortage of nurses, which, while not so good for them, is great news for foreign nurses who would like to get a nursing job overseas in the United States. Here are the 4 criteria that you must meet in order to qualify to register as a nurse in America...

Firstly you can apply for the much coveted Green Card. In order to qualify for a Green Card, you must meet all the criteria above, and sit and pass the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS) examination. To get this visa takes the longest of the three options, but it is the better option for you if you want to make a long term move to the US. It is possible, with a Green Card, to move your nursing career to the US permanently.

Secondly, you can apply for an H-1B visa. To qualify for an H-1B visa you need to have at least a Bachelor’s degree in nursing. If you have a vocational nursing qualification you will not be granted this visa.

The last visa option for nurses is the H-1C visa. The US government issues 500 of these visas to healthcare workers each year.

If you thought that getting a nursing job in the USA was an impossible dream, you were mistaken. You need to get started on your applications right away because medical recruiters in the US are desperate to employ you right now!

Nursing Jobs Overseas Opportunities for Foreign Nurses in the United States

If you are looking to move your nursing abroad to the United States of America, then now is the time to do it. Hospitals in the USA are experiencing a staffing crisis, and this crisis is predicted to become worse over the next decade.

The nursing shortage in the USA is said to be caused by the many factors. On one hand there are many nurses reaching retirement age or choosing to retire early, and there simply aren’t enough newly graduated nurses to fill all the gaps. And there is more strain being placed on existing medical staff because of the bubble of baby boomers reaching retirement.

This is great news for internationally educated nurses because they can now find nursing positions in US hospitals with ease. Hospital administrators are aggressively recruiting foreign nurses.

To nurse in the US, legally, there are many papers to fill out and different states have different rules. In order to qualify to register as a nurse in any state in the US you must meet the following criteria:

• undertaken post high school nursing education. This means you must have graduated high school and then gone on to do your nursing qualification afterwards.
  
  
• be a registered nurse or hold a license to nurse at home. This means that you are legally allowed to practice nursing in the country where you trained or the country where you currently live.
  
  
• have 1 year experience nursing in your specialty. If you aren’t a specialist nurse in, for example, paediatric nursing, psychiatric nursing, neo natal nursing, etc, your specialty would be as an adult nurse.
  
  
• be able to communicate clearly in English. If English is not your first language, you will be required to provide evidence of your ability to communicate to the required standard. This means that you’ll have to take an English language test in speaking, reading, writing and listening.

Should you meet these 4 critical pre-application criteria, you can be assured that you’re a good candidate for getting a nursing job in the United States.