UpGlo Healthcare Connect Contributes to the COVID-19 Response

What Is UpGlo Healthcare Connect?

UpGlo Healthcare Connect matches healthcare employers with internationally trained health and medicine professionals to bolster the U.S. healthcare system, enhance equity and open opportunity for qualified underemployed talent. 

Internationally trained healthcare professionals have important skills to contribute to the COVID-19 response and beyond. Upwardly Global is here to connect them.

How Does UpGlo Healthcare Connect Work?

Upwardly Global supports internationally trained healthcare professionals who currently live in the U.S. and want to contribute their life-saving skills to their communities. Today, we are actively supporting hundreds of professionals across the U.S. who are working to rebuild careers in health and medicine.

These internationally trained professionals have healthcare degrees and work experience outside the United States, full U.S. work authorization, important linguistic and cross-cultural skills, and experience working in crisis situations – including Ebola, SARS and natural disasters. Internationally-trained health and medicine professionals make vitally important contributions to the U.S. healthcare system and are ready to do much more. When we polled our community, a full 93% were eager to support frontline COVID response.

Today, as COVID-19 strains hospitals and clinics across the country, there are 165,000 immigrant and refugee health professionals living here who are not working in the sector. It is essential that we put their skills to work at this time.

UpGlo Healthcare Connect matches internationally-trained health professionals with hospitals, clinics, research organizations, nonprofits and government agencies who need their skills.

How to Join the UpGlo Healthcare Connect Effort

• Healthcare workers and professionals can register with our job search program now.
• If you are a healthcare employer, learning more about our incredible talent and share your facility’s job opportunities by emailing healthcareinquiries@upwardlyglobal.org.
• If you are media and would like to do a story about this opportunity for our country and healthcare system, contact media@upwardlyglobal.org
• Support UpGlo Healthcare Connect by donating. Reach out to devteam@upwardlyglobal.org or visit our Donate page.

Where can I learn more about UpGlo Healthcare Connect?

Upwardly Global continues to shape a new narrative about the ways that immigrants and refugees are contributing to our nation’s COVID-19 response. Check out recent press hits:

• Illinois should ease path for immigrant health care workers. Crain’s Chicago Business, May 27, 2021.
• Refugee Docs Forced to Start Over to Practice in US. Medscape, April 6, 2021.
• Op-Ed: I’m an immigrant working to get vaccines to every American – but I could be doing so much more. Texas Signal, March 22, 2021.
• Amid COVID-19 Health Worker Shortage, Foreign-Trained Professionals Sit on Sidelines. US News & World Report, January 25, 2021.
• Estados permiten contratar profesionales de salud extranjeros por la pandemia. Chicago Tribune, January 25, 2021.
• How Chicago’s immigrants can help us chart a path to COVID recovery. Crain’s Chicago Business, September 17., 2020.
• Maine Voices: COVID was the first wave — a mental health crisis will be the second, Portland Press-Herald, August 21, 2020.
• We can’t afford to sideline these essential workers now, Crain’s Chicago Business, August 7, 2020.
• I’m an immigrant doctor in Philadelphia. It shouldn’t be so hard for us to do our jobs, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 31, 2020.
• Foreign-trained health care providers and COVID-19, Medical Economics, July 8, 2020.
• Don’t leave qualified immigrant health professionals on the sidelines, Virginia Mercury, July 6, 2020.
• What July 4th Means to a Sudanese Refugee and Paramedic on the Frontlines of Covid-19, Ebony, July 3, 2020.
• As coronavirus spreads, refugee doctors want to join the fight, UNCHR, May 18, 2020.
• Why NYC’s Many Foreign-Born Healthcare Workers Can’t Help Fight The Pandemic, Gothamist, April 23, 2020.
• These immigrant doctors want to help the US fight coronavirus, but they’re stuck on the sidelines, CNN, March 30, 2020.