Canada: Nurses need help funding French lessons

Monday, January 17, 2005: Canada: Quebec: Nurses need help funding French lessons:"Health professionals working in public institutions in Quebec need to be able to work in French. Nobody with any common sense would challenge this general assertion, and indeed it has not been seriously challenged. But now let's try another general assertion: Quebec is short of nurses, and needs all of them it can get. This one is equally impossible to challenge. These two truisms bump up against each other in the case of nurses such as Elizabeth Davantes, Joan Mitchell, and Eulin Gumbs, experienced nurses who lost their jobs at the Jewish General because they were unable to pass a French test required of everyone who comes to Quebec to work in any of 47 professions. Two of the three women are now in the Employment Insurance system. The third is working in a fast-food joint."
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=40de9a25-72a3-4dba-bfbe-62d0405962cf

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Andrew Lopez, RN
http://www.nursefriendly.com/news

kind of like US nurses need Spanish lessons

Yep exactly like that.

However, every job ad I've ever seen has said "bilingual preferred." Very few places are willing to pay a nurse more just because they can translate.

They'd rather rely on volunteers in the hospital, or family members and hope they can make sense of the medical terminology involved.

Not exactly a safe approach.

Andrew Lopez, RN
http://www.nursinga2z.com