Every state has its own laws requiring people in certain professions to secure the government’s approval before they can work in their chosen occupations. The problem for military families is that they move around so much, typically every two to three years. As a result, spouses in licensed professions either have to give up their careers or go through the long, cumbersome, and bureaucratic process of getting relicensed every time they move.
By the time they get
through the paperwork, complete the testing, get their license, and find a new
job in the new state, new orders will likely come through that they will have to
move again and start the process all over. At some point, they begin to ask
when it will be their turn to put their careers first. Some talk about it. Some
don’t.
“I thought about it
every day,” said Debbi Chapman, an open-heart intensive care unit nurse who
eventually gave up her profession because it became unworkable to maintain her
license as she moved from state to state. “Did I voice it? No. But I’m sure
there are many spouses out there that are not as accepting as I was.
“It’s like, which career is more important?” said Chapman, whose husband recently retired as an Army sergeant and bomb disposal expert. “My career is very important to the patients I work with. But his job is important to the country and to what he believes in and what he feels. We agree on that. He did a job that not many other people could do or would do. So it was important that he was highly trained. My job is important. I’m highly trained, but so is he, and in the grand scheme of things he was protecting the greater good.”
Chapman spent years
jumping through the hoops, as she calls it, of trying to maintain her
specialized nursing license amid frequent moves from state to state. Both she
and her husband, Matthew, were well into their highly skilled, life-and-death
careers by the time they married in 2003.
He was an explosive
ordnance disposal specialist in the Army, trained to defuse bombs and other
improvised explosive devices that would later bedevil American troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq. She had been a licensed nurse in Pennsylvania since 1992,
specializing in intensive care treatment for patients immediately after open
heart surgeries.
Early in their
courtship, Matthew was stationed in Germany. In 2001, he received his transfer
back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, so Debbi moved there to be with him. She
got a job as a nurse in the base hospital. Because it was a federal facility,
she was able to use her Pennsylvania nursing license rather than get one in
North Carolina.
Matthew was flying home
from Germany on September 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed airplanes into the
World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.
After about a year
working on base, Chapman got a job at a civilian hospital in Cape Fear, North
Carolina, which had a large open heart surgery center. Because the Chapmans
were not married at the time, she did not qualify for any special treatment
under the state’s otherwise military-friendly laws and policies. Despite her
experience in specialized nursing, it took about six months to wade through the
paperwork and get her state license.
Three days after their
2003 wedding, Matthew Chapman was notified he was being deployed to Iraq.
Ironically, given her
later experiences, Debbi Chapman recalls attending a conference in 2004 in
which military and North Carolina state officials outlined new policies that
states were developing to make it easier for military spouses to transfer their
professional licenses when they moved. Particularly encouraging was an effort
launched about 2000 called the Nurse Licensure Compact, an agreement among
member states which was supposed to allow a nurse licensed in one state to
practice in another without having to get a new license.
Then reality set in.
In 2005, the Chapmans
were transferred to Florida. At the time, Florida was not in the nurses’
compact. It joined in 2016. That’s one of the main shortcomings of the compact
and similar agreements: they do the military spouse no good if the state they
are moving to or from does not participate. Currently 34 states are in the
compact. “None of the states we have ever lived in have been compact states
where the license would transfer,” Debbi Chapman said. “So every state I would
have to redo the process.”
It took several months
to get her Florida license, but since she’d started the application process
early she was able to get it approved and start working with little downtime.
She was in Florida
until 2010, when her husband got new orders and they moved to Korea, where she
was unable to work because of restrictions on employing non-Korean nationals.
Then in 2012, the
Chapmans’ new orders sent them to Savannah, Georgia.
Debbi Chapman said she
looked into getting a new license in Georgia, but the process would have taken
months and, as she puts it, cost a small fortune. In the end, she “just gave
up” and left the profession. Chapman said she “absolutely” would have gotten a
new license in Georgia if she could have simply transferred her nursing
credentials. It wasn’t an easy decision, both professionally and financially,
she said. Military pay is not great, especially for enlisted personnel.
“That became a joke in
my house because I made exceedingly more than Matthew was making,” she said.
“It’s frustrating, especially when you are losing money because you have to
take this amount of time off because your license is not going through.”
Chapman, like other
nurses interviewed by the Goldwater Institute, said the difficulty in
transferring their licenses from state to state makes no sense. The job they do
does not change. The standards for patient care do not change. And nurses, like
people working in most other health-related professions, take the same national
standards tests.
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