THIS IS in reaction to a news story titled “Nurses swamp DOLE for rural jobs.” (Inquirer, 1/20/11)
There are about 200,000 unemployed nurses in the Philippines and 40,000 more are expected to be added by June. Preying on the desperation of many nurses to find jobs here or abroad, new types of “businesses,” including but not limited to the now infamous “nursing-training for a fee,” have mushroomed these past few years.
Thanks to the efforts of several health advocacy groups and the nursing community, this matter is being addressed by the Philippine Senate and other policymaking agencies of the government. I hope their response will not be another case of “ningas cogon.”
In rehashing the President Gloria Arroyo’s NARS (Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas) program into RN Heals (Registered Nurses for Health Enhancement And Local Service), the Aquino administration is admitting two realities: first, there is a high demand for the services of nurses in the Philippines; second, hundreds of poor communities in cities and rural areas direly need the services of professional health workers.
A study initiated by the Health Alliance for Democracy showed that seven out of 10 patients die without any medical attention. This paints a sad picture of the state of our country’s healthcare system. The irony of ironies is, our country has 200,000 jobless nurses but Filipinos are dying from illnesses that are treatable and preventable except that there are no health workers to attend to their health needs. The “oversupply” of nurses is therefore a myth. There is no oversupply, the demand is overwhelming; it’s just that there are no available jobs for nurses.
Is RN Heals the solution? Definitely not! This program is a palliative that will just paper over two major problems: unemployed/underemployed nurses, and our country’s failed health care delivery system. What will happen after their six-month employment under RN Heals? Its predecessor, the NARS program, did not result in tenured positions in public hospitals for a substantial number of nurses. RN Heals runs on the same template, how can it deliver a different result? RN Heals also ignores salient provisions of the Nursing Act of 2002, especially those concerning wages and benefits of entry level nurses.
If the Aquino administration is dead serious about addressing this matter, it should create more “plantilla” positions for nurses in our understaffed hospitals, build more rural health and medical centers, and aggressively deploy thousands of tenured health care providers to far-flung communities. All the rhetoric about universal health care and daang matuwid will be empty words unless they are translated into action.
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