Code aims to aid foreign nurses

A coalition of healthcare groups has unveiled a code of ethics it hopes will protect nurses from other countries from abusive employment practices when they take jobs in the United States. Since the late 1990s, the United States has struggled to recruit enough nurses to serve its rapidly aging population, and a 2004 survey found that about 4% of all registered nurses in the United States had been educated abroad. But the coalition that prepared the ethics guidelines says that some are given jobs beneath their skill level, or are not placed in the hospitals or medical facilities they were promised. Others may not be paid fairly compared with their American counterparts.