Amid Global Health Worker Shortage, CGFNS Assembles Board of Experts to Advise on Next-Generation Solutions to Streamline International Mobility for Health Workers

PHILADELPHIA, February 22, 2023 (Newswire.com) - With a global health worker shortage accelerating the demand for internationally educated nurses in industrialized countries, CGFNS International, a global leader in credentials evaluation to support health worker mobility, has established an advisory board of experts to help the organization support the needs of a growing cadre of migrating health professionals.

The Global Advisory Board on Pathways to Mobility for Health Workers - comprising 11 accomplished leaders in health worker credentialing, e-learning systems and digital credentialing technologies - will convene over the next four months to help establish a vision and a roadmap for the future of verifying and promoting the knowledge-based practice competencies of health workers.

Given recent trends identified in the CGFNS Nurse Migration Report 2022: Trends in Healthcare Migration to the United States, applications through the organization's VisaScreen® Service have more than doubled over the past five years, as the growing health worker shortage has left health systems struggling to fill vacancies. Meanwhile, BMJ Global Health estimated a worldwide shortfall of 15 million health workers in 2020.

In light of this shortage, many health systems are under pressure to accelerate hiring and will turn to internationally qualified health professionals seeking to migrate. At the same time, these highly technically skilled professionals must be properly evaluated, qualified and credentialed to perform the work that is critical to patient safety and quality of care.

"Increasing global mobility among nurses and other health professionals is vitally important to ensuring that they can be hired wherever and whenever they are needed. Verifying previous training and credentials of migrating nurses is a complicated process critically important to patient safety, but amid the nursing shortage there is a growing need to make it quicker, more efficient, more secure and to harden it against fraud," said CGFNS President and CEO Peter Preziosi.

"Fortunately, emerging technologies and practice innovations offer the promise of globally-available digital credentials or badges that are more secure and more easily verifiable across borders," said Preziosi. "Whether it's automating manual verification of licenses and transcripts, or developing online methods of assessing knowledge in both clinical and desktop settings, the challenge is to ensure that these solutions raise the bar for quality of care and patient safety."

"Guided by a commitment to standards, we need to drive our industry toward further developing and adopting these types of solutions as quickly as possible, and with our new advisory board we are bringing together some of the best minds from credentialing, edtech and digital innovation to help point the way on this highly complex issue," he added.

The Global Advisory Board on Pathways to Mobility for Health Workers will convene three times by mid-year. It will seek ways to expand and support collaborative efforts to build a new framework for testing and credential verification solutions on a global scale, thereby strengthening career development and health systems worldwide.

Members of the board are listed below. Further information about them can be found at cgfns.org/global-advisory-board:

• Jay Cannon, Partner, Trinisys
• Kathy Chappell, Senior VP, American Nurses Credentialing Center
• Rina Desai, Principal/Owner, Eigen X and Trifactor
• Paul Diefenbach, Associate Professor, Drexel University Digital Media Department
• Cynthia Johansen, Registrar & Chief Executive Officer, British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives
• Brigette Lumpkins, Business Development, Stax
• Martin Lund, Founder & CTO, RSVP/SM Solutions
• Jyllene Miller, Global Growth Executive
• Monique Morrow, Senior Distinguished Architect, Syniverse Technologies
• Simone Ravaioli, Director, Parchment
• Rolf Reinhardt, LinkedIn & International Council on Badges and Credentials

About CGFNS International, Inc.
Founded in 1977 and based in Philadelphia, CGFNS International is an immigration-neutral not-for-profit organization proudly serving as the world's largest credentials evaluation organization for the nursing and allied health professions. For more information, visit www.cgfns.org.