The Plight of (Some) Filipino Nurses
New nurses would have certainly thought their ordeal in going through the course is over once they have passed the board examination. Except for a few who have friends in high places who can guarantee their placements, these new nurses are in for a big surprise at finding how hard it would be for them to get local employment. The best that they can get is volunteer work at their own expense, and with the government in the background bewailing why should they go and seek employment abroad.
It is December time again and traditionally, a big batch of new nursing graduates flocks to the testing centers during this time to take the Philippine nurses board examination. However, due to the expected record number of nursing graduates scheduled to take the board examination, the schedule was held a week earlier, in the last week of November 2008.
Those hopefuls will now dream of the day when the results will be released sometime in March or early April of 2009. All their hopes as well as those of their parents and relatives are pinned on the passing grade from the examination. A passing mark would mean complete success of the long years of hard labor and sacrifices the course demanded in their college days.
Or would it be? Most would-be passers might be in for an unpleasant surprise, if not total dismay.
For unless one new nurse has a friend in high places or a close kin in the hierarchy of patronizing Philippine politics, and there is just a few of them, a nursing board examination passer would realize that passing does not guarantee the final success one is expecting of.
It has not been a long time ago when a nurses association openly decried the fact that some Philippine hospitals are making new nurses pay so that they can be taken-in as volunteers to work in these hospitals. Whereas the clamor ended up without sufficient proof of the veracity of the claim, it is most common for these new nurses to end up serving in hospitals in a voluntary basis.
What is meant by these is that these new nurses will be rendering full hospital service hours and duties without any salary or honorarium and they have to pay for their food, fare, and the provision and maintenance of their nurses’ uniforms.
Why? Even some undergraduates employed in the BPO business like call centers enjoy a ten-digit salary at the moment they start their training. Even those intending to become policemen or firemen start receiving their salaries even at the start of their training.
Compare this with those graduating from one of the hardest, most tedious, most demanding, and one of the most expensive college nursing course, passing the board examination only to end up as volunteers, spending their own money and God knows when they will be gainfully employed. I have known of one who was employed a few months after the volunteer duty, and lucky enough to work for a minimum-wage salary-the same as even a laborer without formal education is earning.
Is this fair compensation for an expensive education?
Not all of these new nurses would be lucky enough to be employed abroad anyway. Could not the government stop its bewailing of the exodus of nurses to other countries and start at providing sensible solutions here in our country to this stop this exploitation?
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