Loren wants RP's healthcare
deployment thrust reassessed

Senator Loren Legarda called yesterday for a reassessment of the country's strategy in producing more and more health care professionals in view of the admission by the Professional Regulatory Commission (PRC) that 400,000 licensed Filipino nurses are presently unemployed.

"I do not subscribe to the PRC giving false hopes on these unemployed nurses by saying jobs are available for them abroad. This because no less than the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) said that demand for Filipino nurses overseas is dwindling," said Legarda.

Legarda surmised that most of the unemployed nurses are new graduates and new passers of the PRC exam. This being the case, it would not be factual to say that jobs are waiting for them abroad.

"The fact of the matter is that most countries employ nurses who already have experience. So how can new nurses qualify for the trumpeted jobs abroad when they could not even get the required experience locally," she pointed out.

The PRC had said that the country now has an "oversupply" of 400,000 licensed nurses, and that both public and private hospitals can only accommodate 60,000 positions.

Last year, Legarda reckoned that the country will soon be producing up to 150,000 nursing graduates every year, at the rate students are entering nursing schools, which are mushrooming all over the country.

And yet, the Department of Health (DOH) had said that annually, only two thousand new nurses are being absorbed by the economy - by both the private sector and government," said Legarda.

As off June 2007, the country's 440 nursing schools reported a staggering total enrolment of 632,108 students.

Legarda noted the seeming difference in the health care situation of the country since only last year the DOH had warned that the sustained migration of doctors and nurses, if left unchecked, is bound to strain the country's health care system.

Eighty-five percent of Filipino health care professionals are working overseas, the DOH reported in 2007.

"From the fears of not having enough nurses only last year, now we have an oversupply," she said.

Legarda had lamented that nurses employed in the Philippines are the most underpaid in the region, if not the whole world, with some employed in private medical institutions receiving as low a salary as P6000 a month, according to the PNA.

The senator also expressed dismay over the complaint aired by the head of the PNA of the alleged practice of many hospitals to rely on on-the-job trainees to fill up some of their staffing needs.

"Worse, training fees are said to be collected by these hospitals from these OJTs without making good of their promise to employ them after their training period."