Grass now greener on this side of the fence
May 10, 2008
Mike Funston
STAFF REPORTER
For nurses Justine Thompson and Scott and Melanie Koshman, there's no place like home.
Thompson, of Cobourg, and the Koshmans, of Burlington, and were among thousands of Ontario nurses forced to look for work south of the border during the 1990s, when local jobs for new nursing grads almost dried up.
Scott Koshman couldn't find a full-time or even a part-time job and ended up taking a position as a health-care aide, along with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Melanie.
"We had no opportunity here to use the skills we had just learned and we reached a point where we had to find jobs or lose those skills," Koshman says.
So, they went to a job fair in Toronto and accepted offers on the spot from a hospital in San Antonio, Texas.
Wages were comparable to those in Ontario but the cost of living in San Antonio was considerably less, such as a spacious apartment for only $425 a month, Koshman says.
"We signed a one-year contract and found it to be a great place to work," he says, noting they received a thorough orientation to prepare them for their first nursing jobs.
After their contract expired, the couple worked for an agency as travel nurses, usually spending 90 days at a time at hospitals in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, working the northern states in the summer and heading south in the winter.
"It was a great learning experience – nice variety, but for career development, there were some cons to it. Every place we went, it was just to fill a slot," he says.
When it was time to start a family, they decided to come home in 1998.
But the job market was still tight and Koshman had to work at several part-time positions for the equivalent of a full-time salary for the first two years.
"I worked part-time at a nursing home, the VON (Victorian Order of Nurses) and a hospital in Burlington. Then I got a part-time position at McMaster University's hospital and that lead to full-time there."
Melanie also worked a variety of jobs while having three children, Emily, 9, Dennis, 7, and Charlie, 5. She is currently working in a nursing home in Hamilton.
Koshman later moved to Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga before recently accepting a job as clinical nurse educator at William Osler Health Centre, an upward career move he's excited about.
"Nursing is in much better shape today," he says. "We are a well-treated profession in Ontario, with plenty of opportunity. There's a lot of public respect for nurses here. It's a little bit different in the States, where nursing is looked on more as a blue-collar job. Nurses are better educated and there's more professionalism here. I don't think they invest as much in you in the States as they do here."
Thompson, who graduated from Durham College in 1995, applied at more than 100 institutions from coast to coast but didn't get a single job offer.
"I would have gone any place. But I didn't even get a part-time offer," she says. So she took a job as a personal support worker for $14 an hour and started looking to the U.S. for nursing.
"It didn't take long before I found a job in Florida in a cardiac step-down (recovery) unit. But I actually had to take a pay cut to $12 an hour. I knew that once I got my foot in the door and gained some experience, I would be in a better position."
She later worked as a travel nurse "to see the country," earning $25 an hour, and eventually landed in Boston, where she got experience in all aspects of intensive care, including cardiovascular and neurological, and her pay went up to $35 an hour.
She spent her last four years in the U.S. working for an Oregon hospital. In Boston, she had married an American and had a child, but later divorced and decided she wanted to return to Ontario in time for her daughter to start school in 2004.
She found a job immediately at Sunnybrook hospital and was paid a $5,000 bonus for moving expenses. The bonus was the clincher.
"I couldn't have afforded the move otherwise," she says.
She stayed at Sunnybrook for 18 months, eventually growing tried of commuting, then took a job at a Cobourg hospital for two years, before landing a position as director of care at an area nursing home.
"I feel I'm better rounded in my career because of it. But I'll take living in Canada hands down over the U.S. You start looking at things like health care and the availability of services, especially when you have children. It became apparent to me that was not the place I wanted to raise my child."
Toronto Star