A Survey of Foreign-Educated Nurses: Workforce Experience

The United States (US) is currently undergoing a nursing shortage. As a result, many health care agencies in the US and around the world are turning to nurses educated in other countries to fill vacant positions. Despite the increased utilization of foreign-educated nurses, there is a lack of understanding of how these nurses transition into the US workforce. This study describes foreign-educated nurses who work in Illinois and the factors that affected their transition into the US professional nursing workforce. By focusing on nurses who were educated abroad and work in Illinois, this study will help Illinois nurses and Illinois nursing employers to better understand the transition process foreign-educated nurses undergo. An original questionnaire, entitled A Survey of Workforce Experience of Foreign-educated Registered Nurses, was developed based upon a literature review and two related studies. This tool was used to survey 18 foreign-educated nurses working in Illinois in two agencies. Results demonstrated that the demographic and workforce characteristics of the foreign-educated nurses working in Illinois are similar to national foreign-educated nurse data. Most nurses in this study indicated they encountered limited communication problems and were respected

Avoiding Ambiguity and Assessing Uniqueness in Minisatellite Alignment

Several algorithms have been suggested for minisatellite alignment. Their time complexity is high -- close to O(n^3) -- due to the necessary reconstruction of duplication histories. We investigate the uniqueness of optimal alignments computed under the common single-copy duplication model. To this extent, it is necessary to avoid ambiguity in the algorithm employed. We re-code the ARLEM algorithm in the form of a grammar, and apply a disambiguation technique which uses a mapping to a canonical representation of minisatellite alignments. Having arrived at a non-ambiguous algorithm this way, we demonstrate that the underlying model -- independent of the algorithm -- gives rise to an exorbitant number of different, co-optimal alignments when applied to real-world data. We conclude that alignment-free methods should be considered for minisatellite comparison