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By Rene Q. Bas Editor in Chief
While the case of the 26 Filipino
nurses and one physical therapist is an extremely rare conflict in
terms of being big news here and in the US, instances of Pinoy
nurses abandoning their employers are not uncommon.
Lawyer Ibaro Relamide told The
Manila Times that before the Sentosa 27++ “acted up en masse,”
the Sentosa Group of medical and healthcare facilities had already
experienced individual cases of nurses who would resign because they
want to go to California or to another state to be with their
friends and cousins. But, he said, the Sentosa Group just turned a
blind eye to these contract-breakers out of compassion and to avert
conflict.
Seldom spoken of by the nursing
community is something that a Philippine Star writer, Shiela
Crisostomo, reported earlier on February 18.
Under the heading “New Pinoy
nurses losing sense of responsibility,” Crisostomo’s report
makes that rarest of disclosures about Filipino nurses abroad. It
quotes the president of the Philippine Nurses Association in the
United States, Rosario May Mayor, saying her association had been
“receiving reports that many Filipino nurses in the US abruptly
leave their jobs to move to other hospitals.”
Crisostomo writes that the
Filipino nursing community’s leaders in the US are concerned
“over the deteriorating sense of responsibility of the new breed
of Filipino nurses.” These are the very ones blessed by “growing
opportunities to work abroad” because there is a nursing and
caregiver shortage in the United States.
Mayor told Crisostomo of a letter
from Global Service Inc., a recruitment agency in the US, claiming
that many of its “client-hospitals were complaining about Filipino
nurses” for “breaking their employment agreements without a
work-related cause.”
Global alleges that Filipino
nurses would just move to another location “to be near their
friends and family.” Global’s letter claims the practice
“seems to be becoming more rampant as other nurses learn that they
can break their employment agreements with no serious repercussions.
Complaining that The Sunday Times
special report of March 9, “Sentosa 27++ down but not out,”
sided unfairly with the nurses and neglected to show the good that
the Sentosa Group has done for the Philippines and the Filipino
nurses, Sentosa’s Relamida told The Times the Global Service Inc.
complaint was not an isolated case.
Besides those the Sentosa Group
has experienced, Relamide cited the incident in January involving
the Heart of Florida Regional Medical Center in Orlando, Florida.
There, he said, “a nurse resigned without notice. She boldly
asserted she had no work-related complaint to make, but she just
wanted to be in Texas so she could take care of a sick aunt.”
He said the Sentosa Group and
other recruitment agencies and hospital-employers are very familiar
with these types of incidents.
Relamide said, “The nursing
leadership must correct this. If more and more incidents like this
happen, and people believe the baseless accusations made by the
Sentosa 27++ Filipino nurses—despite their being proved in the
courts to be at fault because we have not done anything wrong to
them—the image of all Filipino nurses will become so bad in the
United States.”
“The time will come when US
hospitals will not want to accept Filipino nurses,” he added.
“Remember, Indian, Pakistani and Latin American nurses and health
caregivers are also being given visas by the US government.”
“It is understandable that
hometown sentiment over the plight of the nurses is written about,
but what had been inadvertently deemphasized is the simple fact that
what had happened to these nurses were of their own doing,”
Relamida said.
He added that “the inordinate
focus and emotional support given to the complaints filed by the
Sentosa 27++ against the Sentosa Group—which had all been judged
and resolved in favor of the Group by various courts and government
agencies in the United States and here in Manila—will not be good
for the Filipino nurses in the long run.”
“It makes people forget that
the complaints the Sentosa 27++ filed and lost were their
initiatives,” Relamide said. “Their own behavior, their acts of
breaching their contracts and making false accusations against us
caused their defeat in the courts. It is their own fault that now 10
of them and their lawyer face a grand jury trial over a criminal
indictment filed by the State of New York.”
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