Figures from the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing Inc., which administers the National Council Licensure Examination, showed that 26,972 Filipino nurses took their first licensure test from January to September this year.
According to Quezon City Rep. Marvin Rillo, vice chair of the House committee on higher and technical education, it was an “all-time high number” for the country’s nursing graduates, being more than double the 12,399 who took the test during the same period in 2022.
Passing the exam, which 49 percent of Philippine-educated nurses pass on their first take, is the final step in the US nurse licensing process.
“The surge in the number of nursing graduates from the Philippines taking the US licensure examination betrays a looming new wave of mass migration of practitioners to America,” Rillo said.
“The government should take forceful action now and invest more money to hang on to some of our nurses in the local health sector,” he said, suggesting a major salary hike for entry-level nurses in government hospitals.
According to data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), 18,644 nurses went overseas in 2019, 16,711 of them as temporary migrants and 1,933 as permanent migrants. A migration ban during the pandemic forced the figure to drop in 2020 and 2021.
In light of this mass migration of health workers, a 2020 study by the University of the Philippines showed that there were 8.2 nurses per 10,000 population nationwide, which is below the World Health Organization prescribed ratio of 10:10,000. The average of 3.7 doctors per 10,000 is also below the 10:1000 prescribed by the WHO.
For nurses, Rillo is seeking to remedy the situation by proposing to raise the lowest monthly base pay of nurses employed by government hospitals by 75 percent – from P36,619 to P63,997, citing the WHO warning that overseas migration could result in a nurse shortfall in the Philippines of 249,843 by 2030.
Filipino nurses are known throughout the world for their competency, work ethic, and the quality of care they provide. Unfortunately for the Philippines, their countrymen rarely get to experience the care they are known for because most have either migrated or have plans to migrate, because it is no longer worth it for them to live and work here.
It will be a major challenge for our government to be able to change the situation and give all Filipinos, not just the nurses and other professionals, more reasons not to migrate and instead stay home to ply their trade, knowing that they can still build better lives at the same time.*
