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This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of eight self-identified Filipino physician-turned nurses working in Las Vegas in the United States. Participants were interviewed, and audiotaped interviews were transcribed verbatim. Meanings of significant statements and clusters of themes and subthemes were then generated using the Colaizzi's (1978) method. In addition, van Manen's (1990) existentials of lived world was adopted to interpret the collected data. The results of the study revealed that the experiences of these Filipino physician-turned nurses involved multidimensional challenges captured in three themes in context of cross-national and transprofessional migration. As a result, they faced a "double whammy" adjustment to a new cultural and work environment common to all foreign nurses (cultural adaptation) and unique identity/role change from physician to nurse (transprofessional adaptation)-that made their transition especially challenging, resulting in short-lived nursing careers at the bedside. Tailored transition programs for physician-turned foreign nurses are needed to address their transprofessional adaptation. In addition, costs and benefits of recruiting and employing physicianturned foreign nurses as direct caregivers need to be reconsidered in light of this study's findings.
Keywords: physician-turned nurses; lived experiences; transprofessional migration; role conflict
Foreign-educated nurses (FENs) constitute substantial portions of nurse workforce in many developed countries (Kingma, 2006). Recruitment of foreign nurses remains an important mechanism to address the domestic nurse shortage by the United States and other developed countries (Aiken, Buchan, Sochalski, Nichols, & Powell, 2004). The Philippines has been the world's largest exporter of nurses (Kingma, 2006). As of 2005, there were about 470 nursing schools in this island nation of 58 million people (Galvez-Tan, 2006). In 2000, an estimated 163,756 (85%) of the Filipino nurse workforce were working in at least 46 countries (Corcega, Lorenzo, Yabes, De la Merced, & Vales, 2003). In the United States, Filipino nurses constituted 48.7% of FENs in 2008 (Health Resources and Services Administration, 2010).
Although several countries such as India and Pakistan have a large outflow of physicians to developed countries known as "brain drain," the Philippines is the only country that has an industry designed to retrain physicians to become nurses for export. As an emerging phenomenon in the new millennium, a growing number of Filipino physicians have retrained as nurses (MD-RNs) in order to seek employment overseas. This has come...