Will all these lead to better working conditions for our
nurses and keep them here, where they are needed?
Don’t look now, but our health sector is in dire straits at this time because of the acute shortage of nurses who have opted to leave the country for better-paying jobs abroad.
During a recent meeting of the Private Sector Advisory Council Healthcare Sector group in Malacañan Palace, President Marcos pointed out the shortage of nurses has adversely affected the delivery of effective healthcare.
“Our nurses are the best. We are competing with the rest of the world for them. All the presidents, prime ministers I have talked to are asking for more nurses from the Philippines.”
The statistics bear this out. One in 20 nurses working in the United States is a Filipino. Over 150,000 Filipino nurses have immigrated to the United States since the 1960s.
The result? The Philippines now has a shortage of about 106,000 nurses.
According to the Filipino Nurses United, the main reason for the exodus of our nurses is that “the government has not been giving us reasons to stay.”
Our nurses are leaving in droves, they said, because of several factors, such as high nurse-to-patient ratio, low wages, and the slow response by government to health-care workers’ concerns.
More than 124,000 Filipino nurses still in the country have been classified by the Department of Health as under “unspecified practice,” meaning they are unemployed or working in other fields, such as call centers.
The Professional Regulation Commission listed 915,219 registered Filipino nurses in December 2021, but according to the DOH, more than a third of them, or 316,405 individuals, have moved overseas.
At the height of the pandemic, the exodus of senior nurses who found work abroad left their younger colleagues overburdened with work and delayed benefits.
Consider the pay that nurses here receive.
The salary of nurses in the Philippines is among the lowest in Asia.
In Metro Manila, a nurse at a private hospital receives a monthly salary of P17,000, equivalent to the daily minimum wage of P570. Salaries are even lower in the provinces.
In government hospitals, the base pay of nurses is P35,000 under the Philippine Nursing Act of 2002. In Vietnam, the salary of nurses is equivalent to P60,000.
Compare that with the average annual salary of Filipino nurses in the United States, which is $57,600, or around P3.3 million, or a monthly pay of about P275,000.
At the House of Representatives, nurses’ groups are lobbying for a bill filed by Makabayan lawmakers to set a minimum monthly salary of P50,000 for nurses in public and private hospitals.
FNU and other health workers’ groups believe that nurses deserve higher pay and an acceptable living wage as professionals who risk their lives in the line of duty.
To address the glaring shortage of nurses, the Commission on Higher Education is already carrying out carrying out several measures.
These include retooling those who failed board examinations, adopting a nursing curriculum with exit credentials, redirecting nonpracticing nurses, and conducting exchange programs with other countries.
For instance, under the nursing curriculum with exit credentials, students could have several options: exit at the end of Level I or II, obtain the certificate or diploma in nursing, or choose to continue and finish the four-year nursing program to become a registered nurse.
CHED is also working on a flexible short-term masteral program to address the lack of instructors in nursing and medical schools.
The Health Department, meanwhile, is monitoring the status of the proposed legislation on the Magna Carta for Public Health Care Workers and Philippine Nursing Act. It is also doing a study on the standardization of salaries of nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers.
To address the drain of nursing professionals, the DOH has also proposed to retain the 7,000 annual deployment cap for new-hire medical workers abroad.
Last year, the government announced it might resort to providing scholarships for nurses and other medical workers to encourage them to stay and serve in the country.
For its part, the PSAC vowed to monitor new technologies in healthcare that could be used in geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas and recommend these to the DOH and PhilHealth.
It is also studying the feasibility of establishing remote diagnostics centers and assessing new medical technologies and their costs.
Will all these lead to better working conditions for our nurses and keep them here, where they are needed?
We’ll have to wait and see.
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