Why international nurses
For CEOs, CNOs, CFOs & HR directors
There aren’tenough nursesin America.
You already see it in your own building: beds you cannot open, cases that wait, units leaning on overtime, and a growing dependence on contract labor just to hold the line. The national shortage is not a statistic to you, it’s a daily staffing problem.
The federal projections back it up
The shortage is deeper where you are.
108,960
Projected national shortage of full-time RNs by 2038
92,672
Qualified applications turned away by nursing schools, 2025
189,100
New RNs needed every year through 2034 just to keep pace
Most hospitals have spent the last five years patching this with contract labor. That is not a solution. It is an expensive way to keep the problem alive.
If you run a rural or critical access hospital, the shortage is not coming for you eventually. It is already deeper where you are. Rural hospitals →
Why the shortage won't fix itself
Four forces. None of them reverse on their own.
01
A retirement wave
More than a million RNs are set to retire by 2030, taking decades of institutional knowledge out the door with them.
02
A faculty ceiling
Nursing schools turned away 92,672 qualified applications in 2025, not for lack of talent, but for lack of faculty to teach them.
03
Burnout and turnover
Nearly half of new RNs leave the bedside within their first two years (NSI, 2024). The pipeline that is already too narrow is also leaking on the way out.
04
A demand curve that keeps climbing
The U.S. needs roughly 189,100 new RNs every year through 2034 just to keep pace. No amount of domestic recruitment spending closes that gap on its own.
The real cost of contract labor
Contract labor isn’t a workforce strategy. It’s the absence of one, at a premium price.
$91.23
Avg. contract labor rate / hour, vs. $59.46 for a permanent RN
$66K+
The gap, compounded, per nurse, per year
8.6%
Avg. hospital RN vacancy rate, roughly 43 unfilled positions
$60,090
Cost of losing a single bedside RN to turnover (NSI 2026)
And the dollar figures understate the real cost: contract nurses rotate out every 13 weeks, and every rotation means re-onboarding, re-orienting, and losing the clinical continuity that patient outcomes depend on.
Global MedTeam's solution
Direct-hire international nurses, qualified on arrival.
Internationally educated nurses (IENs) are NCLEX-qualified, English-proficient clinicians who trained and practiced in rigorous healthcare systems long before they applied to come to the United States. Global MedTeam places them differently than the rest of the industry.
01
Your employee, from day one
Your payroll, your benefits, your org chart, with no staffing contract sitting in between.
02
They chose your hospital
The department, the location, the facility, all selected directly. That choice is the foundation of why they stay.
03
A life, not a rotation
Many IENs relocate with their families, settling in for the long term rather than a contract to renew or drop.
Why the timing matters now
The hospitals with stable teams later are planning now.
Start now, and have a stable team years ahead of hospitals that wait.
Ready to build a plan?
The EB-3 Planning Guide is a practical walkthrough of the international nurse recruitment process, built for hospital administrators and workforce planning teams.
Full citations for this page
- HRSA, National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, Nursing Workforce Projections Factsheet, December 2025
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Registered Nurses, 2024–2034
- AACN, 2025–2026 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing
- NSI Nursing Solutions, 2026 National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report
- The Gypsy Nurse / Betternurse.org, Travel Nursing Costs 2026
- NEAC Medical Exams Application Center, USRN Timeline 2026