Nurses in the Philippines can’t go abroad, but there are few opportunities at home
- The country already has a surplus of trained nurses, but not enough jobs to go round, with some hospitals paying less than a shop assistant could earn
- Critics blame the government for depressing wages by ‘commodifying’ the nursing profession with its decades-long focus on exporting manpower
But that misfortune turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as 22 years later she is now president of the city’s Filipino Nurses Association, and has used her earnings to put six siblings through school.
This is why she rejects the Philippine government’s decision late last month to cap the number of newly hired nurses and other health professionals it sends abroad annually at 5,000, starting from this year.
When announcing the cap imposed by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Covid-19, labour secretary Silvestre Bello said it was imposed to ensure the country had enough medical professionals to continue to fight the pandemic, adding that the cap might “increase eventually”. The Philippines has recorded more than 435,000 cases of Covid-19 and close to 8,500 related deaths, the second highest in both categories in Southeast Asia.
However, Dr Anthony Leachon, a former special adviser to the Covid-19 task force, told This Week in Asia the cap was “unnecessary” even from the perspective of handling the pandemic. He said the country had a large untapped pool of nurses who worked in “odd jobs like call centres” because of the low pay nurses earned in the Philippines.