NURSING PROGRAMS | Government must focus on nurses’ basic issues, raise wages to P50K

NURSING PROGRAMS | Government must focus on nurses’ basic issues, raise wages to P50K – nurses’ group

July 14, 2022 , 04:08 PM

By Clarist Zablan

(July 14, 2022) – The government needs to address the more basic issues faced by Filipino nurses, such as poor working conditions and quality of education, rather than allowing more schools to offer nursing programs to address the country’s nurse shortage, a nurses’ group said on Thursday.

Jocelyn Andamo, secretary general of Filipino Nurses United (FNU), said the Philippines is not lacking in the number of nursing schools, estimated between 300 and almost 500.

The country also has enough nurses to fill the 200,000 nurse gap in hospitals reported by the Department of Health (DOH), but there are at least 100,000 nursing professionals who are either unemployed, misemployed, or working in unrelated fields, she said.

“Ito pong ginawang pag-lift ng moratorium ay malamang pag-tugon na naman sa demand ng world market, pero ang maganda po sana, tingnan muna natin paano natin matugunan ang mismong problema po natin dito sa Pilipinas,” Andamo said on CignalTV’s One News channel’s program “Agenda.”

Earlier, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) lifted an 11-year moratorium on creating new undergraduate and graduate nursing programs for universities and colleges.

The moratorium was imposed in 2011 due to a surplus of nursing graduates and a decline in the passing rates in licensure examinations. CHED cited data from the labor department showing that as many as 280,000 nursing graduates were either unemployed or underemployed.

A decade later, CHED said that the Philippines needed 300,000 nurses in order to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) relative to the country’s population. The country has around 90,000 nurses, but this does not include nursing professionals who are currently jobless.

The exodus of nurses in the Philippines has been blamed on low salaries and poor working conditions – the country pays the lowest for its nurses in Southeast Asia at only P40,381 per month, based on data from information aggregator iPrice Group in 2020.

Andamo also said that nurses in the private sector are only receiving salaries of P10,000 to P13,000 per month. Private duty nurses receive higher wages, but they often do not enjoy security of tenure, she said. Nurses employed in government hospitals get a much higher salary of about P30,000 a month.

FNU urged the government to raise the entry-level salaries of nurses to P50,000 per month – still lower than that of regional peers but could at least provide them a sustainable wage, she said.

“Although sa buong mundo talagang may shortage ng nurses, pero kailangan tignan. We have to start somewhere. Very basic po, napakababa ng sahod ng nurses at halos hindi na maka-tao ang kalagayan ng work conditions ng nurses,” Andaya said.

Andamo expressed worries that the lifting of the moratorium could once again affect the quality of nursing education in the country.

“Nung narinig po namin yung balita, actually worried kami. We are really worried because baka magka-problema nanaman tayo. Imbis na nasosolusyonan natin ang mga nursing concerns and issues, e mayroon tayong panibagong malaking problema,” Andamo said.

(MM)

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