Promoting social inclusion of nurses recruited from abroad into the work community

What matters does the guide provide information and tips on?

• How to support workplace inclusion starting from the recruitment stage?
• How to prepare the work community for receiving nurses recruited from abroad?
• What should be taken into account in the orientation of nurses recruited from abroad?
• What factors should the supervisors take into account when a nurse recruited from abroad joins the work community? And how can the organisation support the work of supervisors?
• How to promote the inclusion of people recruited from abroad into the work community?
• How to ensure the fluency of work and interaction in a multilingual workplace and the development of the recruited nurses’ language skills? 

For whom?

This guide is primarily aimed at those responsible for the international recruitment of healthcare and social services organisations, those responsible for the development of personnel and organisation, and supervisors and management.

Why?

The ageing of the population will increasingly result in a labour shortage in the healthcare and social services sector. Current registered nurses and practical nurses will be retiring while the need for care will increase as the population ages. Several measures and solutions are needed to ensure adequate care and health services and an adequate workforce. One such solution is to recruit nurses from abroad in an ethically sustainable manner.

From the perspectives of both the recruiting organisation and the recruited person, it is important to ensure that nurses can become part of their work communities and are able to carry out their work productively and in a high-quality manner as part of the care team. It is also important that they feel well at work, want to stay in their workplace long-term and are gradually able to take on tasks corresponding to their competence. 

What?

Recruiting employees from abroad is not a new phenomenon, but many healthcare and social services organisations are facing a new situation when recruiting nurses from abroad. Recruitment from abroad in the healthcare and social services sector involves factors that should be taken into account when planning recruitment and receiving the recruited people.

Having prior experience with multiculturalism within the organization may be an advantage. However, regulated professions in the health and social services sector, and the fact that few newcomers have previous experience of working in Finland or Finland in general, bring their own additional dimension to the nurses’ settling-in and integration into work and the work community.  

The guide describes how the inclusion into work and the work community of a nurse recruited from abroad can be helped from the very beginning of the recruitment process. Orientation requires time and resources in the early stages, but investing in it is worthwhile. Recruitment from abroad also brings changes to the role of supervisors.

Inclusion into the work community is essential from the perspective of both the fluency of work and well-being at work. It is also important in terms of whether the nurse wants to keep working in the organisation and work unit. When recruiting from abroad, the importance of language proficiency cannot be ignored, and language issues are a matter for the entire work community. The recruiting organisations should invest in adapting language-aware practices.

The recruiting organisations should ensure that, while the competence development of other personnel is supported, nurses recruited from abroad are also guaranteed opportunities to increase their competence and advance in their careers.

The six sections of this guide are their own packages, but they are connected and partly overlap. For example, the language question relates in some way to all sections. We recommend you to explore each section.

Research behind the guide 

This guide was produced in the project Recruiting from abroad and employee retention in the healthcare and social services sector, which was implemented with funding from the Ami Foundation. 

The guide is based on research carried out in three healthcare and social services organisations in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, which had already begun recruiting Filipino nurses and continued to do so during the project. The majority of those recruited had completed either a registered nurse or a practical nurse degree in the Philippines. In addition, persons who had worked as care givers were also recruited to the organisations.

The study included interviews with nurses recruited from abroad, their workplace instructors, supervisors, management, HR representatives, and other experts as well as representatives of stakeholders.  The study also included workplace observations. The good practices and development needs identified in the study were discussed in workshops organised for the organisations, in which the practices were further developed and new solutions sought. 

This guide was produced by Chief Specialist Barbara Bergbom and Researcher Mirkka Vuorento from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health.