Filipino nurses anticipate seeing serious but not angry Finns

The 20 nurses recruited from the Philippines by the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa will arrive here today

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The long-awaited group of 20 Filipino nurses is to arrive today - Thursday.
      These nurses are only a small step on the way to improving the acute shortage of nursing professionals in Finland, but it is a major shift in the recruitment policy of Finnish hospitals.
      This is the first time for the public health sector to look for labour force actively from outside of Europe. For the first time they will also be placed in the demanding special fields of nursing.
      The new nurses are scheduled to start work at the Helsinki University Central Hospital (HUCH) on April 19th.
      They will be placed in pairs in the hospitals of Meilahti, Töölö, Herttoniemi, Jorvi, and Peijas, as well as in the Surgical Hospital in Helsinki.
     
All these Filipino nurses are experienced nursing professionals, who also have some work experience abroad. They will use Finnish as their working language.
      ”These nurses have been studying Finnish in the Philippines for nine months. Six hours every day, five days a week”, reports Mika Eskola, the Managing Director of the Finnish recruitment company Opteam.
      The recruitment of the Filipino nurses is a joint project conducted by HUCH in cooperation with the Laurea University of Applied Sciences and Opteam.
      In Finland, the Filipino nurses will be paid the same salaries as their Finnish colleagues get.
      HUCH will sign a two-year contract with the foreign nurses. After that, the hospital will evaluate how well the nurses have adapted themselves to Finland, how the working community has accepted the arrivals, and whether or not HUCH should further expand its recruitment from abroad.
     
”We hope that our model would be good enough to be adopted even elsewhere in Finland. We really want this venture to succeed”, says Personnel Manager Kirsi Sillanpää from HUCH.
      According to Sillanpää, Finnish hospitals will really have to check all possible sources in order that they can secure the availability of nurses even in the future.
      ”Over the next decade, a total of aproximately 2,400 nurses will retire from the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa alone”, Sillanpää notes.
     
The working community is already looking forward to the arrival of their new colleagues, says HUCH nurse Tiina Salovaara, who took part in the job interviews of the nurses in the Philippines.
      ”It is true that some suspicions have also been expressed in the course of the recruitment process. However, today the atmosphere is different, and everyone is eagrly expecting the arrival of their Filipino colleagues”, Salovaara continues.
      In the predominantly female workplace, future colleagues have been worried whether there is enough food in the fridge for the newcomers, when they arrive in the flats after their long flight.
     
Even the Filipino nurses themselves have some expectations concerning Finland.
      When asked what they would imagine Finns to be like, the nurses answered that Finns are ”serious but not angry”, Salovaara reports.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Helsinki University Central Hospital hit by nurse shortage (26.3.2009)
  Filipino nurses in Finland for the long haul (29.4.2008)

Links:
  Laurea University of Applied Sciences
  Opteam

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