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Nursing our nurses

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The group Filipino Nurses United has called on the International Labor Organization – High Level Tripartite Mission to the Philippines to examine the violations of nursing workforce standards in the country, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, stressing that “labor standards on work hours, nurse-to-patient ratio and security of tenure are basic nurse’s rights that have been violated.”

FNU said that understaffing in healthcare facilities forces nurses to handle 20 to 50 patients per shift and work for up to 16 hours without overtime pay. For reference, the nurse-to-patient ratio set by the Department of Health is one nurse to 12 patients per duty in the general ward.

It terms of pay, nurses in private hospitals reportedly get around P12,000 a month, while those employed in government-run institutions are entitled to Salary Grade 15 or just over P35,000. Pay is generally much lower in areas outside Metro Manila.

According to FNU, around 36,000 government nurses are contractual workers who are prevented from voicing out their grievances, and opt not to join associations or unions for fear of termination or not being rehired. I added that around 10,000 DOH nurses will be losing their jobs.

“During the height of the pandemic, nurses have faced great risks in nursing functions as they perform with inadequate protection, excessive work hours due to understaffing, and further exploited with no leaves or lack of benefits in spite of getting sick and exposed to COVID-19 in performance of duty,” FNU said.

The FNU also sought the support of ILO in its work of organizing nurses and advocating for their rights, citing the vilification campaign against the association.

It is unfortunate that the country’s nurses have to turn to the ILO-HLTM to air their grievances over the exploitation they claim to endure under the yoke of employers in this country, when their own government should be looking out for them, especially as we are still emerging from a crisis that has exposed so many flaws within our public health system.

Have the people in charge not learned anything over the past 3 years? If they can be oblivious to the plight of health workers who played a critical role during the height of the pandemic and even now, what other problems are they pretending to ignore?*

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