In an attempt to tackle staff shortages in the Netherlands’ healthcare sector, Summa College, together with care employment agency Otto Healthcare, will hire and train nurses from Asia to work in healthcare.
The staff shortage is enormous, and continuously increasing. According to Summa, the healthcare system is now almost 50,000 pairs of hands short and that number will have increased to 140,000 pairs by 2030. Therefore, Otto wants to hire nurses from the Philippines, Indonesia and India to cover this shortage. The intention is that the labor migrants will come to work in the Netherlands for about five years.
Summa College will retrain these nurses so that they are also authorized to work in Dutch hospitals and nursing homes. “The healthcare professionals are trained by us in medical preparation, such as in clinical reasoning in the Dutch language,” says Katinka van Garderen, director of Summa Zorg.
Holland and Limburg
“For fourteen weeks, we will prepare them step by step for the BI assessment, a mandatory component for foreign nurses. After that, they can start working as a registered nurse,” says Garderen. The first nurses are expected to arrive from Southeast Asia in the autumn. We will start with a few dozen nurses who will start work in Limburg and South Holland.
17,000 beds
“The first group is already eager to get to work here,” said a spokesman for Otto. “In addition, we ensure that everyone is well accommodated and supervised here. Our director has a share in the real estate company Kafra Housing, which offers housing for migrant workers. That company has about 17,000 beds at its disposal, so housing will not be a problem.”
Workers will not receive a flex contract, but a contract with the hospital where they work. This way, their living situation is also separate from their employment contract. This is a positive development because migrant workers who work with a flex contract often become homeless when they lose their job.
Settling
“Suppose someone is not able to settle in here or in a certain hospital, then we will first do everything we can to ensure that someone can still find his or her niche,” says the spokesperson. “It will never happen that someone is thrown out on the street overnight. If it really doesn’t work out well with someone, or if someone gets homesick, we guide that person back to the country of origin,” said the spokesperson.
Source: Studio040
For Eindhoven News: Lila Mehrez
