From the News! – Your Daily News

Mayen Jaymalin
Philippine Star

Here’s good news for the growing number of jobless Filipino nurses.

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) reported yesterday (Dec. 4)  that the United Kingdom has re-opened its doors to Filipino nurses.

“After a lull of over a year, the United Kingdom is again hiring Filipino nurses,” Labor Secretary Marianito Roque said in an interview.

Roque said an initial batch of 160 Filipinos would be deployed to various hospitals and retirement homes in Britain.

Over a year ago, the United Kingdom adopted stricter regulations in the hiring of foreign nurses, thus virtually closing the door for the employment of Filipino nurses there.

“For a while there has been no vacancy for Filipino nurses in UK, but because of the aging population there, they realized they need our Filipino nurses to take care of them,” Roque noted.

Roque expressed confidence that the recruitment of 160 Filipino nurses in UK signals the start of growth in demand for Filipino nurses worldwide.

“We hope that more Filipino nurses will be recruited to work in UK and other countries abroad,” Roque said.

The Philippine Nursing Association reported that the country is now experiencing a surplus of Filipino nurses due to the declining demand in the United States.

Roque had previously ordered a dialogue with all the stakeholders at the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) office to determine the real situation of the country’s nursing sector.

He said DOLE conducted the dialogue to determine whether there is really a shortage or a surplus of nurses so that the government could come out with appropriate measures.

Jose Katigbak / STAR Washington Bureau
Philippine Star

WASHINGTON – Their influx into the United States may be leveling off or in decline according to anecdotal evidence, but Filipino nurses still rule the roost when it comes to patient satisfaction.

Health professionals are in great demand in the US and the Department of Health and Human Services calculates that by 2020 the country will need about 2.9 million nurses but will only have 1.8 million, a shortfall of 1.1 million.

Filipino or Filipino-American nurses are the best ambassadors of the Philippines because the impact of their quality care is immediate and there are many of them spread in the thousands across the US.

There are current indications that some nurses from the Philippines are not as eager to come to America as before because of the lure of other countries, which pay in euros, tighter US immigrations rules, coupled with the fall of the dollar and tougher competition from other ethnic groups.

As a result of continuing overseas demand, the Philippines produces more nurses than ever but many nursing schools are no more than diploma mills, said Alice Andam who hails from Misamis Occidental and is head of the metropolitan Washington DC chapter of the Philippine Nurses Association of America.

She said she has noticed that more nurses who come from the Philippines now are less proficient in English than they used to be and even more worrying, less experienced.

“They would be better off staying back for a year at least after graduation to polish their Taglish to English and gain practical bedside experience,” she said.

Andam, however, admits she cannot blame new graduates from wanting to immigrate immediately to the United States to start earning dollars.

Between 12,000 and 15,000 nurses and other medical professionals reportedly leave the Philippines each year for better-paying jobs abroad. Many end up in the United States.

Though the value of the dollar has dropped to the peso in recent years – from P55 to P46 to the dollar – it is still attractive to work in the US.

Nurses generally work 12 hours a day, three days a week pulling in about $25 an hour or between $45,000 and $50,000 annually. With overtime they can easily make $60,000 a year, 10 to 15 times what they make in the Philippines.

Rainier Allan Ronda
Philippine Star

The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) is reviewing proposals to set a ceiling on the excess number of nursing students.

CHED acting chairman Emmanuel Angeles III said there had been numerous proposals seeking to limit enrollment of nursing students due to the increasing number of unemployed nurses in the country.

“We will have to evaluate all of (these) first,” Angeles said. “There’s a lot of problems in the nursing (industry).“

Angeles said the CHED is currently reviewing the implementation of Memorandum Order 5 that seeks a moratorium for the opening of new nursing schools.

The same order issued earlier this year sets a new nursing curriculum that distributed basic courses and major courses in a five-year nursing school curriculum.

The new curriculum, which came under fire from nursing school officials, added a few subjects and practicum hours for nursing students.

There were concerns that the new nursing curriculum will only add further financial and physical burden to the students and their parents.

Angeles said he would need time to study all the concerns since he was just new in the job.

“This is only my fourth day of office. I need to meet the commissioners en banc next week. Give us enough time to make a study,” Angeles said.

Angeles was named to the CHED top post to replace former acting CHED chairman Romulo Neri who was appointed to the Social Security System last Aug. 29.

Angeles took his oath of office on Sept. 1 but went on a long leave two days later for a personal trip to the United States. He reported back to work last Monday.

Mayen Jaymalin
Philippine Star

Labor Secretary Marianito Roque said negotiations are now going on between the Philippine and the Saudi governments.

“We expect a surge in hiring of Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Roque said Saudi Arabia is now offering more “quality jobs” for Filipino nurses than the United States.

“I have talked to a number of Filipino nurses who opted to transfer from the United States to Saudi Arabia because they say they earn more in the Kingdom,” he said.

There are 5,000 job orders from Saudi Arabia for Filipino nurses that are yet to be filled.

Earlier, the Philippine Nursing Association reported that the country is experiencing a surplus of Filipino nurses due to the declining demand in the US.

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration said there is a huge demand for Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia and various European countries.

The POEA has urged Filipino nurses to look at other opportunities and try their luck elsewhere instead of competing with the limited job vacancies in the United States.

Meanwhile, Roque said the Department of Labor and Employment will hold a dialogue with all stakeholders at the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration yesterday to determine the real situation of the nursing sector.

“We have called a dialogue so we could determine whether there is really a shortage or a surplus so we could come out with appropriate measures,” he said.

The DOLE is planning a similar dialogue with other professions to prevent a possible manpower shortage in the country.

Rene Q. Bas Editor in Chief
Manila Times

While the case of the 26 Filipino nurses and one physical therapist is an extremely rare conflict in terms of being big news here and in the US, instances of Pinoy nurses abandoning their employers are not uncommon.

Lawyer Ibaro Relamide told The Manila Times that before the Sentosa 27++ “acted up en masse,” the Sentosa Group of medical and healthcare facilities had already experienced individual cases of nurses who would resign because they want to go to California or to another state to be with their friends and cousins. But, he said, the Sentosa Group just turned a blind eye to these contract-breakers out of compassion and to avert conflict.

Seldom spoken of by the nursing community is something that a Philippine Star writer, Shiela Crisostomo, reported earlier on February 18.

Under the heading “New Pinoy nurses losing sense of responsibility,” Crisostomo’s report makes that rarest of disclosures about Filipino nurses abroad. It quotes the president of the Philippine Nurses Association in the United States, Rosario May Mayor, saying her association had been “receiving reports that many Filipino nurses in the US abruptly leave their jobs to move to other hospitals.”

Crisostomo writes that the Filipino nursing community’s leaders in the US are concerned “over the deteriorating sense of responsibility of the new breed of Filipino nurses.” These are the very ones blessed by “growing opportunities to work abroad” because there is a nursing and caregiver shortage in the United States.

Mayor told Crisostomo of a letter from Global Service Inc., a recruitment agency in the US, claiming that many of its “client-hospitals were complaining about Filipino nurses” for “breaking their employment agreements without a work-related cause.”

Global alleges that Filipino nurses would just move to another location “to be near their friends and family.” Global’s letter claims the practice “seems to be becoming more rampant as other nurses learn that they can break their employment agreements with no serious repercussions.

Complaining that The Sunday Times special report of March 9, “Sentosa 27++ down but not out,” sided unfairly with the nurses and neglected to show the good that the Sentosa Group has done for the Philippines and the Filipino nurses, Sentosa’s Relamida told The Times the Global Service Inc. complaint was not an isolated case.

Besides those the Sentosa Group has experienced, Relamide cited the incident in January involving the Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center in Orlando, Florida. There, he said, “a nurse resigned without notice. She boldly asserted she had no work-related complaint to make, but she just wanted to be in Texas so she could take care of a sick aunt.”

He said the Sentosa Group and other recruitment agencies and hospital-employers are very familiar with these types of incidents.

Relamide said, “The nursing leadership must correct this. If more and more incidents like this happen, and people believe the baseless accusations made by the Sentosa 27++ Filipino nurses—despite their being proved in the courts to be at fault because we have not done anything wrong to them—the image of all Filipino nurses will become so bad in the United States.”

“The time will come when US hospitals will not want to accept Filipino nurses,” he added. “Remember, Indian, Pakistani and Latin American nurses and health caregivers are also being given visas by the US government.”

“It is understandable that hometown sentiment over the plight of the nurses is written about, but what had been inadvertently deemphasized is the simple fact that what had happened to these nurses were of their own doing,” Relamida said.

He added that “the inordinate focus and emotional support given to the complaints filed by the Sentosa 27++ against the Sentosa Group—which had all been judged and resolved in favor of the Group by various courts and government agencies in the United States and here in Manila—will not be good for the Filipino nurses in the long run.”

“It makes people forget that the complaints the Sentosa 27++ filed and lost were their initiatives,” Relamide said. “Their own behavior, their acts of breaching their contracts and making false accusations against us caused their defeat in the courts. It is their own fault that now 10 of them and their lawyer face a grand jury trial over a criminal indictment filed by the State of New York.”

Nora O. Gamolo
Manila Times

For decades, nurses have been among the most exportable of Filipino professionals.

Starting in the late 1950s, nurses sought work in the United States, which remains a major job destination for them. In the 1960s, they trained their sights on Canada. From later that decade to the present, they have been seeking employment in various countries of the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Libya. In the 1990s, they also started going to the United Kingdom in droves.

Now, nurses are among those envisioned to be exported to Japan. In fact, one of the most pressing considerations for the ratification of the controversial Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) is the possibility for Filipino nurses to enter this labor-stringent country.

In 2007, more than 21,000 new Filipino nurses sought US jobs, according to the country’s biggest labor federation, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines.

Trade Union spokesman Alex Aguilar said a total of 21,499 Filipinos took the US National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) for nurses for the first time—that is, excluding repeaters—from January to December 2007.

This represents an increase of 6,328 or 42 percent compared to 2006, when 15,171 Filipinos took the NCLEX for the first time.

He said the 2007 NCLEX statistics, released on January 24 by the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing, “solidified” the Philippines’ position as America’s top supplier of foreign nurses.

In 2007, the Philippines readily topped the five countries with the most number of nationals taking the NCLEX for the first time. India came second, with 5,370 examinees; followed by South Korea, 1,906; Canada, 888; and Cuba, 673.

Passing the NCLEX is usually the final step in the nurse licensure process in the US. Thus, the number of people taking the examination is a reliable indicator of how many new US-educated and foreign-trained nurses are trying to enter the profession in the US.

The Trade Union has been pushing for the deployment of surplus nurses and other highly skilled workers to lucrative job markets overseas, rather than the overseas deployment of unskilled workers such as domestic helpers whose “skills are easily replaceable” and “far more susceptible to employer abuse,” Aguilar said.

Filipino nurses looking for greener pastures could definitely count on greater employment opportunities in the US, where more than 800 new hospitals will be put up until 2012.

Aguilar said some 78 million American baby boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—now compose 26 percent of the 300-million US population. The oldest baby boomers started turning 60 years old in 2006, he added.

“These seniors and the deluge of migrants from Mexico are creating a huge demand for hospitalization and health care in the US,” Aguilar said.

He played down fears of a brain drain with the continuing deployment of Filipino nurses to overseas labor markets.

Because of the lucrative jobs available overseas, the nursing profession is one of the most popular in the Philippines.

In August 2007, the Professional Regulation Commission admitted to the local nursing profession a total of 31,275 candidates who passed the June 2007 licensure examination. This does not include the thousands of candidates who took the December 2007 nursing eligibility examination.

On top of those who took the December examination, the commission said it expects anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 nursing graduates to take the June 2008 licensure test.

Meanwhile, the Trade Union has renewed its objection to a bill filed in the House of Representatives that seeks to require nurses who obtained government-subsidized schooling to render at least two years of compulsory local service before they can leave for overseas employment.

The bill seeks to obligate nursing graduates of state colleges and universities to perform 24 months of service here before they may be lawfully recruited to work abroad. The Trade Union said the bill was “totally counterproductive and uncalled-for,” considering the massive oversupply of nurses in the local labor market.

“We are now producing nurses at a rate of 100,000 to 150,000 every year, and less than 5 percent of them are getting employed locally, either by the government or the private sector. So we definitely have a large surplus of nurses,” he said.

“Our sense is, if we must advance the export of services. We might as well consciously encourage the deployment of highly skilled surplus professionals, such as nurses, who are generally immune from employer mistreatment,” Aguilar said.

Better protection needed

The Trade Union’s position, however, is being belied by the convoluted issues surrounding the Sentosa 27++ nurses. Even highly trained and respected Filipino nurses, among the most sought after, are no longer immune from the issues of mistreatment, if the complaining Sentosa nurses are to be believed.

Leah Primitiva Samco-Paquiz, president of the Philippine Nursing Association, also called for better protection for nurses in the proposed JPEPA, which she charged will only give $400 training allowance to any professional Filipino nurse who hasn’t passed Japan’s stiff nursing licensure examination.

Even those already practicing as professional nurses have to take the examination. Failure to pass it in three years will cause the deportation of the nurse back to the country, Paquiz said.

“It will only ensure a supply of low-paid nurses to Japan,” she added.

She also called for a program for government to streamline recruitment of nurses and assist families of Overseas Filipino Workers in dealing with labor-migration issues, calling attention to the need for a database of all nurses working inside and outside the country to be drawn up to track their welfare.