|
By Nora O. Gamolo, OFW Times Editor
A few hours before President Gloria Arroyo
delivers her state of the Nation address (SONA) in Congress on
Monday, nurses will be converging along Commonwealth Avenue, near
the Batasang Pambansa complex, to hear their own SONA.
Theirs will be their own State of the Nurses
Address, and they are demanding the Arroyo government implement the
long-overdue increase in their salaries to P16,093, equivalent to
Salary Grade 15 in the government service.
“If employers are giving, at the very least,
[P16,093], our nurses will not even leave the country,” said Dr.
Leah Samaco Paquiz, president of the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA),
the biggest nurses’ organization in the country.
“This amount is not given, even to nurses in
the government service. We can’t believe [government doesn’t]
have the money,” said Paquiz.
Some nurses in private hospitals are complaining
that they get lower than the mandated minimum basic pay, currently
pegged at P362 a day for non-agricultural workers in the National
Capital Region, and even lower in the regions. The minimum wage is
set by tripartite regional wage boards.
This amount, recommended as the minimum salary
for government nurses, is a key provision of Republic Act (R. A.)
9173, the Nursing Act of 2002, but has never been implemented since
its promulgation.
“It is clear in the law’s Sec. 32 that in
order to enhance the general welfare, commitment to service and
professionalism of nurses, the minimum base pay of nurses working in
public health institutions should not be lower than salary grade
15,” stressed Paquiz.
“How do we expect nurses to remain in
government service with this [low] salary?” asked Paquiz,
explaining that while salary alone is not the nurses’ reason for
service, they could not provide for their families solely from their
income. Hence, foreign employment becomes more attractive to nurses.
She asserted that nurses, a necessary member of
any public health team, would have loved to serve their own people,
but are discouraged by the very low salary they are getting from the
workload normally assigned to them.
A nurse attends to as many as 50 patients to a
single nurse in many hospitals, even if the ideal ratio is one nurse
to 10 non-emergency or non-critical care patients.
In many hospitals, too, fresh nursing graduates
who have just passed the board examination work with the regular
nursing team as “volunteers” just to secure the minimum two- or
three-year service required for them to be employed abroad.
“We need to entice these nurses to work in
public health and in government service by this simple request to
provide them with what is just and legal,” emphasized Paquiz,
stressing that the general public stands to benefit from giving
nurses better pay.
The Department of Labor and Employment has
lately announced that the global demand for locally trained Pinoy
nurses still remains high especially in Western countries with an
aging population.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque said demand for
Filipino nurses is not dwindling, but many nurses have no adequate
experience, preventing them from finding overseas employment.
He said the US is putting a cap on the entry of
Filipino nurses, but there are other markets abroad for capable
nurses, saying that the Saudi Arabian government is in need of
10,000 nurses for its public hospitals and want Filipino nurses to
fill in these vacancies. There is also a growing demand for Filipino
nurses in Canada as well as Australia.
PNA’s Paquiz was once quoted as saying that
the demand for Filipino nurses had “plateaued” in the US since
2006 because of the “visa retrogression” there. The United
Kingdom, meanwhile, has made its policies on immigrants stricter.
“In the US, the quota for visas has been
filled up, resulting in delayed processing of visas with current
efforts focused on 2006 accepted applicants,” Paquiz reportedly
said.
She added that “many licensed nurses are now
underemployed or unemployed as a result of changes of policy in
destination countries, the current situation of oversupply and
quality problems, among others.”
In 2007, over 21,000 new Filipino nurses sought
jobs in the United States, according to the country’s biggest
labor federation, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP).
TUCP spokesperson Alex Aguilar said a total of
21,499 Filipinos took the US National Council Licensure Examination
(NCLEX) for nurses for the first time (that is, excluding repeaters)
from January to December 2007.
This represents an increase of 6,328 or 42
percent compared to the 15,171 Filipinos that took the NCLEX for the
first time in the whole of 2006.
Aguilar said the 2007 NCLEX statistics, released
January 24 by the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing,
“solidified” the Philippines’ position as America’s top
provider of foreign nurses.
The Philippines readily topped the five
countries with the most number of nationals taking the NCLEX for the
first time in 2007. India came second, with 5,370 examinees;
followed by South Korea, 1,906; Canada, 888; and Cuba, 673.
Meanwhile, the country has 27,765 new nurses who
passed the June board examination.
TUCP looks at the big population of nursing
graduates differently. “We are now producing nurses at a rate of
100,000 to 150,000 every year, and less than five percent of them
are getting employed locally, either by the government or the
private sector. So we definitely have a large surplus of nurses,”
Aguilar said.
|
