Loren seeks better pay for RP medical workers

Senator Loren Legarda said today that the exodus to other countries of Filipino medical practitioners will continue unless they are provided competitive remunerations and more humane working conditions in the Philippines, noting that the P19,000 average monthly of local doctors are just above the starting salary of most call center agents.

The chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Demography, Loren said that the unabated migration of Filipino health workers reduces the quality of healthcare available in the country as its top doctors and nurses are lured by high-paying jobs abroad.

"The salaries of Filipino health workers abroad and here in the Philippines are world's apart. Data in 2006 which considered the median payscale of 17 countries showed that abroad doctors and nurses earn an average of P138,000 and P38,000 respectively," said Loren.

"Compare that with the P19,000 monthly average pay of doctors employed in the Philippines and their nursing counterparts who take a veritable starvation pay of P9,000 while being forced to take 16-hour shifts or, in some instances, even three-day shifts broken only by catnaps."

Loren said that the pay of local health workers are on average even lower than those received by accountants, engineers and similar professionals at an average range of P14,000 to P24,000 a month. Among the estimated 24,700 call center workers in the country, the starting range of pay is from P10,000 to P15,000.

The senator said that the exodus of Filipino health workers cannot be brushed aside as the more experienced doctors and nurses are the ones who are gobbled up by other countries.

"The phenomenon of local doctors studying to become nurses abroad should emphasize the wide disparity between what medical workers earn abroad and locally," she said. "The flight of our healthcare providers are directly related to their own plight."

She noted a report by the Philippine Medical Association (PMA) that of its 35,000 member-doctors, at least 6,000 have already sought jobs abroad.

To be able to offer competitive salaries to local health workers, Loren said that hospitals and medical centers must practice corporate social responsibility by taking care of their own workers and not just looking at their profit margin.

"The problem is even big private hospitals in the country give their workers too little despite raking in money from their operations. This has to change if we are to entice our medical workers to stay," she said.