Muña wants to cultivate local workforce at hospital

Speaking to Current Issues students at the Northern Marianas College earlier this month, Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. CEO Esther Muña encouraged them to pursue careers in healthcare to build up the hospital’s workforce.

“There is a job for everyone at CHCC…such as healthcare finance if you like numbers. If you like medical records and understanding concepts, medical coding is a good job,” she added.

Muña said that, as a member of the State Development Board, they often discuss how to encourage more students to get into the medical field.

“I often tell the students that you don’t have to be a nurse or a doctor to pursue a career in healthcare as you can be anything you want be,” she said.

Speaking from experience, Muña said she started by getting a degree in accounting, became a medical transcriber, went into healthcare management, hospital administration, medical office manager, business office manager, chief finance officer, hospital administrator, chief operating officer, and finally, chief executive officer.

Right now, Muña is working on providing incentives for students who want to pursue nursing and eventually hire them at CHCC.

“We are finding ways how we can provide incentives for students who are pursuing the course of nursing and we talked about incentives like [student] loan repayment and provide bonuses if you sign a contract with CHCC because giving incentives is a practice in the U.S.,” she said.

“We love our [foreign workers] but the reality is we also have the young generation that are coming in who more educated now and are passionately pursuing degrees. I want to say is, if you have questions, visit us at CHCC and I’ll be here to mentor you,” she added.

Muña said the door at CHCC is always open to local hires.

“The law specifically says that if you are going to apply a nurse as H1-B…one requirement is that the applicant must have a bachelor’s degree. The reason we opted against it is we are basically preserving the pipeline of NMC because, if we are going to require that everyone has a bachelor’s degree, then even the nurses from the Philippines that have bachelor’s degrees can be processed as H1-Bs,” she said.

“If we do that, it means we are blocking the college students that are coming from NMC. We don’t want to do that as we want to preserve our pipeline, preserve local hires, and also take care of those who have been here for quite a long time,” she added.