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.”