Reaction Entry (May 18, 2011)

Jobless nurses urged to serve provinces

May 16, 2011 20:26:00

Desiree Caluza Vincent Cabreza

Philippine Daily Inquirer

BAGUIO CITY—-Now that jobs abroad have become scarce for Filipino nurses, their next option is to bring that “tender loving care,” for which they have become cherished in foreign hospitals, back to the provinces where they are most needed.

Senior nurses and health workers celebrated this year’s International Nurses Day on May 12 by exploring why health practitioners in the last 10 years have lost the passion for rural service, having set their sights on high-paying jobs abroad.

Erlinda Caster Palaganas, a senior adviser to the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA), said new health workers could regain that passion for service by working in remote villages in the country.

“Tender loving care is ‘tatak nurse’ (nurse’s trademark). It is something you may not find in other professions. Care is the most abstract [task] of the nursingprofession because they are able to provide psychological, spiritual and emotional [service] to their patients,” Palaganas told reporters here on Friday.

Health Secretary Enrique Ona, during a May 9 news conference here, advised incoming college students to momentarily avoid taking nursing courses because the unstable world economy has left 200,000 Filipino nurses without jobs.

The demand may resume once the economic and political situations in different parts of the world stabilize, Ona said.

He gave assurances that the government was looking for ways to increase its budget for hiring more nurses. The 2011 budget, he said, had provisions for hiring 10,000 nurses for deployment to the provinces.

Officials of the PNA said work in the provinces will always be available for nurses.

“We need to produce doctors and nurses who are [dedicated]. We have observed that health workers now are impatient and not compassionate [when attending to patients in local hospitals]. There is no more ‘tender loving care’ because most of them think about going abroad,” said Lily Bimuyag, senior nurse of the Department of Health (DOH) in the Cordillera.

According to Palaganas, health workers are confronted by poor working conditions and low salaries in the country.

Senior health workers in the Cordillera said “care” is a value so complex that it can not be broken down into lesson plans by nursing and medical schools.

But Palaganas said schools could provide future nurses and health workers proper role models whom they can emulate when they treat or attend to patients.

Assigning young health workers to poor communities could also inspire them once they see the condition of health care in remote areas.

“When you work in the barrios, you will develop that caring, that passion because you see reality,” Palaganas said.

But young nurses who decide to take this option must be prepared for a hard journey.

Caridad Binwag, head of the DOH Cordillera human resource management and development service, said doctors who are assigned to the barrios are provided enough information about their places of assignment.

“Even fresh graduates would undergo community immersion and we monitor them. We tell them the mission and the vision of serving communities. But after a while, [they] would drop out [of the program] because they would be assigned to [remote villages],” she said.

Assistant Secretary Elmer Punzalan said the DOH’s other option to provide employment to nurses and other health workers is to market the quality of Philippine health care.

Punzalan handles the department’s international medical travel and wellness projects. He told the Inquirer that Filipino nurses had earned a good reputation overseas for their empathy, manners and skills. Thus, advertising to foreign patients that they can come and seek medical attention in the Philippines, may help boost medical tourism.

“In many of my speeches, I always say that nurses in the Philippines should be drawing people who need to be cured,” Punzalan said.

However, coordinating an advertising program with the Department of Tourism will take time, he said.

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Reaction:

More than five years ago, an impressionable high-school graduate enrolled in the nursing program of Davao Doctors College. The nursing trend was high and almost everyone also took up nursing mainly because of the promise of landing a job abroad. The prospect of earning dollars is certainly the main reason why many enrolled in the course. But after years of trying to like the course, the high-school graduate dropped out. That drop-out was me.

During the early parts of the 21st century, universities had produced countless nursing professionals. Many successfully landed a job abroad, others locally. But the surge of nursing graduates quickly created a surplus leaving some them either jobless or call center agents. I know many nurses who are now agents in Manila. Other countries place quota on the number of potential slots. This is sensible considering the fact that not all jobs abroad are nursing or medically related jobs. Unfortunately, this bred a competitive atmosphere in the nursing industry and many are left to the curb without a single alternative. Now that nursing is on a downtrend, it is only expected for many would-be nurses to find themselves in the unemployed sector of society. Although they still have a choice of working locally, the wage for nurses in the country cannot compensate for the high-cost of studying it.

The article argued that nursing is rooted in the virtue of care. Certainly, there is no doubt that nursing is about care—Nursing Care is even a subject. However, I learned in my Economics class that people respond to incentives. Their actions are dictated by the prospect of reward and punishment. With the scarcity of money, I cannot expect unemployed nurses to take a job in the country for a meager wage. Virtue is often worth nothing without food on the table. I am not generalizing, though, for there might still be others willing to work on far-flung areas motivated by the virtue of care. I still believe in passion and no work is tiring if one puts his heart into it. But I am a realist. I fail to notice the advantage of working in the provinces for these nurses whose dreams of employment abroad had been crushed by the surplus they themselves also caused. The 10,000 promised nursing jobs, although optimistic, can hardly breathe life into the industry; that’s a mere 5-percent of the total number of out-of-job nurses. The wage alone is not the only issue for nurses encourage to work in parts of the country but living conditions as well. I fear that the combination of low-earning jobs and terrible working conditions would only hinder productivity, making the nursing virtue of care, in this instance, self-defeating. There are simply lesser opportunities for nurses in the country than other countries. 

The only rational advice I got from the article is to stop enrolling in nursing for the meantime. I certainly believe that the hiring slump will only last for a short while. Other countries might still need nurses in the future and we produce some of the best ones. I also agree with the mentioned advice. Since there are already several nurses in the country, the industry had become quite congested and saturated. Adding more fresh nursing graduates would only fuel the unemployment rate. But one thing I would suggest, though, is more career awareness. I hope the government can help in providing proper guidance in effective career choices. Since many of the country’s youths are easily persuaded by society’s current fashion, it is only logical for the government to be involved in giving awareness campaigns, which might even be used to promote other business sectors in need of professionals. Of course, I say this with personal interest in mind but I believe that this can further promote the youth in choosing their future careers wisely.