'Stop the bleeding,' Philippines health official says about international recruiting of nurses
CBC
Rhea Patulay saw the shortage of Filipino nurses up close, sitting by her husband Rico's hospital bed as he recovered from a minibus accident.
"No one there to attend to the patients," she said recently in an interview in Tagalog through a translator. "Doctors usually look after you for operations, surgeries and when they do their rounds, which takes them too long to shows up."
Patulay said one of the nurses working overnight at the hospital near Manila looked like she was still a student. "She said to me 'Ma'am, I am assigned here.'"
The Philippines has traditionally trained more nurses than it needs, knowing they will work internationally and send money back home to support their families.
However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials say an estimated 40 per cent of all Filipino nurses have left the country or retired.
"We would like to stop the bleeding as soon as we can," Dr. Maria Rosario Vergeire, officer-in-charge of the Department of Health, said in a recent interview, adding that the Philippines has a shortage of more than 350,000 nurses.
"Why is it that the higher-income countries are actively recruiting?" she said. "The countries getting our nurses should also be for some form of exchange so there would be something for our country."
Government officials, hospital administrators and nursing advocates in the Philippines are trying to find ways to make their own health-care system sustainable, even as recruitment delegations — including from Canada — come knocking.
Delegations from Manitoba and New Brunswick just returned from recruiting trips in February.
The Manitoba government said it offered letters of intent to nearly 190 registered nurses, 50 people who are the equivalent of licensed practical nurses and 110 health-care aides.
The New Brunswick delegation interviewed more than 500 candidates and made 241 job offers, said a spokesperson for the province's Department of Health. As of March 1, 164 offers had been accepted.
A delegation from Saskatchewan was in the Philippines in December and has made more than 170 job offers to RNs, continuing care assistants and medical lab assistants.
And that's just Canadian provinces. Countries from around the world are competing to attract nurses from the Philippines.
"That is now the problem," Melvin Miranda, president of the Philippine Nurses Association, said through a translator in a recent interview in Manila.