Rural areas short on workers turn to overseas professionals

Cherie Taylor, CEO at Northern Rockies Medical Center in Cut Bank, Montana, currently has four Filipino nurses on her staff. The rural health facility employs a total of 12 full-time registered nurses, which includes 10 floor nurses and two nursing administrative positions. “We have a national registered nurse shortage and all the U.S. nurses cannot fill the vacancies,” Taylor says. “Thank goodness a lot of baby boomers are hanging on and not retiring, or we would be in a national crisis right now.” Taylor adds NRMC might be recruiting a fifth Filipino nurse if she can’t fill her last RN vacancy with a nurse from the U.S. Shelby Schools Superintendent Elliott Crump knows first-hand about the teacher shortage in Montana. The Montana Office of Public Instruction reported 638 full-time openings in the state’s “difficult or hard to fill” teaching positions in 2016-17 and Crump’s school district had four of them. When no qualified applicants from Montana — or anywhere else in the United States — applied for those jobs, he started looking outside the United States and ended up hiring four teachers from the Philippines.