Avant Healthcare Professionals said it would widen its “Dream. Become. Inspire.” Nursing Scholarship from two countries to more than 100, opening the programme to nursing students across most of the world. An Orlando, Florida recruitment and staffing firm that places globally educated nurses in United States hospitals, Avant announced the expansion in a statement distributed by Business Wire. Kenya and the Philippines were the founding markets, the company said, and the wider scheme now reaches students in more than 100 countries. The claims and figures in the release are the company’s own.
What the scholarship offers
The scholarship provides tuition aid and a living stipend, along with mentorship, professional development and community-service placements, Avant Healthcare Professionals said. More than 200 Avant Scholars have passed through it since it began. The company said those scholars had been able to concentrate on their studies and take up leadership, community and research work they had thought out of reach. Applicants must be in their final year of nursing studies, or due to start that final year in 2026.
Timing is tight. The current application window opened this month and closes on 13 April, the company said, with successful candidates notified in July 2026. Marisa Zaharoff, president of Avant Healthcare Professionals, tied the expansion to access rather than ability. “This scholarship helps close that gap,” Zaharoff said. Christina Khan, director of global impact, put the case for the support in plainer terms. “When students know someone is in their corner, everything changes,” Khan said.
Why a staffing firm matters to medical tourism
Avant Healthcare Professionals sits on the recruitment side of a business that medical tourism rarely looks at directly. A destination markets its surgeons, its scanners and its new hospital towers, but its wards run on nurses, and a country cannot turn investment into foreign arrivals without the staff to fill the beds. Nursing capacity is the quiet constraint behind every announcement of a medical city or a patient target. That is why a scholarship aimed at trainee nurses, however small, touches the same shortage that limits how many international patients a hospital can safely take.
The founding markets sharpen the point. Kenya and the Philippines both want to sell care to the world, and both supply nurses to hospitals abroad. Kenya is pressing to make Eldoret its next medical tourism hub, while the Philippines leans on accreditation to hold its position, with Manila Doctors Hospital keeping its Department of Tourism status. A programme that trains nurses in those two countries and channels them towards United States hospitals adds capacity in one place by drawing it from another.
The company behind the scheme
Avant Healthcare Professionals said it is certified by The Joint Commission, a founding member of the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment (AAIHR), and a member of The Alliance for Ethical International Recruitment Practices, known as TruMerit. It is part of the Jackson Healthcare family of companies. For more than two decades the firm has recruited nurses and allied health workers abroad and placed them in hospitals and health systems across the United States, the company said.
Those affiliations carry weight because the trade they describe is contested. Rich health systems recruiting nurses from poorer ones is the exact flow that ethical-recruitment codes were written to govern, and membership of TruMerit is the company’s hedge against the charge that it thins the workforces it draws from. The scholarship, on the company’s account, is the other side of that hedge: training added at the source rather than talent simply removed from it. Whether the two balance is not something a press release can settle.
The first-principles read
Strip out the announcement language and the structure is simple. Workforce is a standing driver of medical tourism, not a footnote to it, because arrivals are capped by staffed beds long before they are capped by demand. A scholarship is an input that shows up years later, if at all, and only if the nurses it trains stay in nursing. Kenya and the Philippines gain trained staff and lose some of them to emigration in the same motion. The United States gains the ones who leave. None of that is visible in a target for foreign patients or a ribbon-cutting for a new tower, which is why staffing is the number worth watching when a destination promises growth it has not yet resourced.
What to watch
The nearest test is dated. Avant Healthcare Professionals said awards would be announced in July 2026, and whether that announcement carries a country-by-country breakdown will show how far past Kenya and the Philippines the programme has actually reached. The 13 April application close is the first checkpoint. Beyond that, the figure that matters is retention: how many of the more than 200 Avant Scholars, and of the wider cohort to come, are still nursing in five years, and in which countries they are doing it.