Nursing Jobs in Honolulu
As of Oct 30, there are signs that the nursing market in Hawaii is looking better. In April I re-posted a link to an article in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that said we had a “saturated” job market.
The need for nurses isn’t going away
It’s just that we have a mismatch in the number being produced and the number we can absorb. this mismatch is due to accelerate. click here for a nifty graphic update about the need for nurses.
Geography Lesson
For those of you not living here, some geography is on order.
Most of the big hospitals are located in downtown urban Honolulu (yes, there is a city here. about 900,000 people. if we were on the mainland we’d have an NFL team. we are the 11th-largest city in the USA. we are not a foreign country.). But the population growth on the island of Oahu is planned to take place in the western side of the island, in the part called Kapolei. For years, there was a hospital in Kapolei, run by the Sisters of St Francis. It went bankrupt after running deficits for years, and hundreds of nurses became unemployed. The job market could not absorb so many nurses at the same time. The building sat vacant for awhile. It was/is a nice building. ample parking. central to their neighborhood. convenient for a whole bunch of people.
During that time, if you lived there and you wanted to go to the hospital you would need to drive on H-1, the most congested interstate highway in the USA ( how we got an interstate here, while we are separated from California by two thousand miles of open ocean, is a whole nother matter).
The building was finally bought by Queen’s Medical Center, the biggest hospital here. QMC has a “Magnet Nursing Service” and is very forward-thinking. they have planned to reopen the Kapolei building.
Job Fair(s)
which brings me to the next step. they will hold two job fairs for nurses in Honolulu, one this coming Saturday Nov 2nd in Kapolei, and another Nov 9th, the following week, in Manoa. they are hiring for all kinds of jobs, not just nurses.
Also, anecdotally, I have run into any more of my former students who are now finally getting out of the holding pattern and into new grad residency programs, particularly at Queen’s. The general consensus is that things are easing. I know I am biased, but I think UH is a terrific school of nursing, and I want to make sure our graduates get properly launched into becoming the fine nurses we educated them to be.
‘
the link
If you want to get to a specific link for the job fair, CLICK HERE.
good luck on the job hunt!
Nursing in Hawaii 