Although there are male nurses, most nurses are female, and since a large majority of them are in child-bearing age, we can surmise that a lot of these medical professionals are also mothers.
On Mother’s Day yesterday, we found it relevant to talk about nursing.
After all, mother and nurse share the same qualities of sympathy and compassion. The same qualities that are good, yet sometimes are fatal.
Consider the case of male nurse Mark John Blanco in Caloocan City, who last May 1 saw a motorcycle rider fall on his motorcycle. He helped the drunk rider, Joel Vecino, to his feet and even assisted him in picking up the motorcycle. When the vehicle failed to start after several tries, Vecino got angry and pulled a gun. He shot the male nurse to death, and also killed another bystander who tried to pacify him. Tough luck, on a tough day for the international workingman.
It was reported that Sunday was not just Mother’s Day, but also the International Nurses Day. And local nurses were again agitated and keyed up. They were frenzied enough to again demand the government to act on issues like fair wages, increasing staffing and regularization of contract positions.
The Filipino Nurses United (FNU) stressed that Filipino nurses, despite their vital contributions to sustaining health systems, continue to face significant challenges, including low wages that fail to keep pace with the rising costs of living.
"Presently, the cliche of being overworked and underpaid health workers has never been a grim, sharp, painful reality to our nurses," FNU said in a statement. Over 100,000 nurses in the private sector in Metro Manila earn only P537 per day, with even lower wages for nurses in other areas, according to FNU.
Nurses in the government sector, although they have relatively higher pay, are burdened by work and patient overload.
"This situation pushes them further to massive migration, long characterized as diaspora, now with 'attractive offers' of bringing along their families and nursing education scholarships with assured employment," it added.
The nurses' organization criticized the government's inadequate support and lack of prioritization to public health service budget allocation, hampering nurses in carrying out their duties effectively and contributing to shortcomings in the healthcare system's ability to meet the needs of Filipinos.
"It is high time that concerned government authorities respond with concrete and decisive measures that will rescue nurses from the serious concerns such as the legislation of just, decent wage increase, mass hiring of qualified nurses, regularize contractual nurses to fill up and add more plantilla positions," FNU said.
There were ideas floated by some officials that were aimed at solving these problems.
Among these are the hiring of 300 unlicensed nurses and the revision of nursing education curriculum and master’s degree program. The group thinks these are "irrational" solutions to the nursing issues of understaffing, low wages, and poor working conditions.
How about the plan touted last year by Health Secretary Ted Herbosa. He said he was planning to create a national nursing advisory council to address the issues faced by Filipino nurses.
Meanwhile, Quezon City Rep. Marvin Rillo, vice chairperson of the House committee on higher and technical education, said yesterday that a total of 6,879 Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) graduates from the Philippines took the US licensure examination for the first time from January to March 2024 in the hope of obtaining gainful employment in America,
“We expect a large number of Philippine nursing graduates to persist in pursuing their career aspirations in America and other foreign labor markets as long as we continue to underpay them here at home,” Rillo said in a statement on International Nurses Day.
The world celebrates the contributions of nurses to society every May 12—the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.
“Congress must substantially upgrade the starting base pay of our nurses now if we want to retain at least some of them for our public hospitals,” Rillo said.
In the whole 12 months of 2023, a record-breaking 36,410 nursing graduates from the Philippines took the US licensure test for the first time, without counting repeaters.
Citing data from the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing Inc., Rillo said a total of 1,486 nursing graduates from India also took the US licensure test for the first time from January to March, along with 744 graduates from Kenya, 632 from Nepal, and 613 from Ghana.
Rillo has been batting for the passage of his bill that seeks to boost by 75 percent the starting base pay of public nurses. Under Rillo’s House Bill No. 5276, the starting pay of government nurses would be bumped up to P63,997 per month from the current rate of P36,619.
Sen. Sonny Angara has also filed Senate Bill No. 638, which proposes to raise the entry-level pay of public nurses to P51,357 per month.
Based on previous reports, up to 4,500 items for nurses in public hospitals run by the Department of Health remain unfilled owing to the lack of takers.
Comments