Another 150 nurses from across the country flocked the Savannah Suite of Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel yesterday in their bid to secure employment overseas.

The 150 nurses followed some 400 who turned up on Tuesday, when the recruitment exercise began. Yesterday was the final day for recruitment and Vaughan Matthews, director of Compass International, the recruiting firm, said that the response from the local nurses was tremendous. Through the US-based firm, registered nurses will be afforded contracts of employment and opportunities to work at American hospitals. Some of nurses on Tuesday expressed dissatisfaction at the conditions they were being made to work under here and said pay - the key determinant - was meagre.

Matthews told Stabroek News yesterday that the primary concern of his firm was to educate and train the nurses in order for them to meet the requisite standard of the United States of America. According to Matthews, this first phase of recruitment will see the nurses who applied writing the standard entry examination for American Nursing schools.

He said that the nurses were not required to take along any documents but maintained that they must be registered nurses. He said before they wrote the examination, for which the maximum time was one hour, he usually conducted a short lecture to guide the nurses as to how they should answer and analyse the questions. He said that so far the papers he and his other colleagues have marked were well done. Matthews said that in another month's time letters would be sent to those who were successful at the examination as well as those who were not. All successful nurses will be considered for employment, he said, as the company did not have a specific target number. The chosen ones will be interviewed and if successful at the interview will commence a three-month class, which will be held at the hotel. They will be guided through their class textbook 'Comprehensive Review For NCLEX' and would be required to answer over 3,000 test questions before completing the programme.

At the end of the three months, the nurses would then travel to Puerto Rico where they would write the main examination. Leading up to the examination the nurses will receive lectures from highly qualified NCLEX instructors. Free flights and accommodation will be provided along with sponsorship of US green cards for all those who qualified and their immediate families. The director said that after the main examination, those who were successful would be assigned to some of the top hospitals in America where they would secure employment. He pointed out that his firm was not employing nurses, but was involved in educating them. Compass International conducts these activities around the world.

Matthews said that his company was interested in forming an alliance with the Guyana Government and the Ministry of Health. Matthews mentioned that if such an alliance should come to fruition his firm would be willing to offer scholarships for nurses here in Guyana to study abroad through the cooperation of the Guyana Government. "I would love to give back something to Guyana. But we are more interested in setting up a scholarship scheme if the government is willing we will certainly be pleased to do so."

According to him, despite the obvious limitations and hardships in Guyana, the Guyanese nurses were on par with their international colleagues.

He called on the Ministry of Health through the government to educate its nurses for the wider world. "Your government has to think in terms of the global economy, they must train their nurses to work anywhere in the world and not just in Guyana.

"Compass International would not return immediately on another such mission because we don't want to deplete the country of its nursing professionals, but we would love to come again either for a similar venture or for the establishing of a scholarship scheme", he added.