The country is still in the grip of a health crisis but it is losing nurses as the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines president Dr. Jose Rene de Grano revealed that about five to ten percent of nurses have resigned in recent weeks for lucrative offers abroad.
“If we don’t stop their departure, maybe in another six months we might run out of nurses and our health facilities and healthcare system will be crippled,” he warned at a recent government briefing.
Filipino nurses are being offered jobs abroad with attractive terms of employment that more healthcare workers could be enticed to apply, further depleting the struggling workforce in the country’s hospitals.
Dr. De Grano added that if government became too lax with allowing healthcare workers to leave without a program to replace them promptly, the workforce of hospitals would be depleted and they would be able to accept a limited number of patients, including COVID-19 cases.
Jao Clumia, president of the St. Luke’s Medical Center Employees Association, said that it is not just jobs abroad that entice nurses to leave hospitals. Even call centers have lured nurses away from medical centers with higher salaries.
Clumia adds that aside from the issue of better pay, the punishing workload and risk of getting infected with COVID-19 have led some health workers to resign. Many nurses work for 12 to 16 hours a day because of the labor shortage. The recruitment of new nurses in some hospitals cannot keep up with resignations. He urged government to focus on providing better salaries and benefits to health workers.
It has been a year and a half since the COVID-19 pandemic became the primary concern of most responsible governments. Up to now, the disproportionate attention given to policemen and military during the government’s drug war has not yet been transferred to the health workers of our country who have been thrust into the frontlines of an unprecedented public health crisis that law enforcers and retired generals are obviously unable to address. Perhaps that is why this country has consistently ranked lowest when it comes to pandemic response.
Faced with a healthcare system that has been constantly in danger of collapse, even before the pandemic struck, our government that has been waging the wrong war has reevaluate its priorities. The resources have to be allocated and programs implemented to ensure that the real front liners of the more important war are paid better, not overworked to exhaustion, as well as provided support and adequate protection as they perform from the perils of their job.*
