Why are the Philippines the largest supplier of Nurses in the World?

[ASEAN NOW News]

As the United States started to experience nursing shortages after WWII, they started to look abroad to recruit nurses.

 

 

The Philippines became an obvious and important source for nurses in large partly because they had been American-trained.

 

This migration of Filipino nurses to the U.S. is not new, and it comes out of a longer history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.

 

Filipino nurses are now employed all over the world.

 

Catherine Choy, a professor on ethnic studies at the University of California Berkeley, details how the U.S. colonial regime started recruiting nurses from the Philippines.

 

She says that the demand for Filipino nurses in the U.S. simply started from the Philippines being a U.S. colony, where the colonial regime established an Americanized education system, including nursing education.

 

Additionally, the U.S. established an education abroad program in the Philippines called the pensionados program, which worked like a study abroad program.

 

Many Filipino nurses became pensionados; some eventually stayed for employment, while others returned to the Philippines to help set up nursing schools in the country from 1903 to 1940.

 

Choy explains that another wave of nursing shortages started to brew in the 1960s, due to the growing women’s movement of that era.

 

As a result, American women had more professional opportunities in all kinds of work. “Before, they were often relegated as professionals to things that were considered appropriate professions for women, like nursing, education, or social work,” she says.

 

“But as the movement grew, there were opportunities in a range of professions, so when that happened, it became difficult to recruit American women into nursing — also because nursing is really demanding work.”

 

Marcos’ survival strategy

 

The constant demand for nurses made way to the continued migration of Filipino nurses to the U.S.

 

This was even more bolstered in the early 1970s when then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos started to promote labor migration from the Philippines.

 

 

There was an increasing number of unemployed young men in the country due to the stagnant economy, and Marcos saw it as an opportunity to send them abroad for overseas work while establishing a system that easily regulates and supports labor outflows.

 

Marcos also observed that there was a high demand of nurses in the U.S. because there were American healthcare institutions specifically recruiting Filipino nurses.

 

“He changed the government’s perspective,” Choy says. “He thought, ‘This could be good because if they want nurses from the Philippines, what we will do is we’ll produce more nurses.'”

 

His administration’s directive was only supposed to be a temporary policy measure to address the country’s immediate concerns, but because domestic socio-economic problems persisted, it turned into a survival strategy.

Choy also highlights that Marcos’ approach, and the eventual migration of Filipinos, was a result of growing economic dissatisfaction.

 

“Nurses from that time period already started to witness or to observe some of the growing socioeconomic inequalities in the Philippines and some of the political turmoil,” she says.

 

“They are also going abroad not just for social and economic mobility but also for stability and security.”

 

By 1982, the country had already established the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), which manages the recruitment and deployment of overseas Filipino workers.

 

Until now, the labor export system of the Philippines has been described to be ‘unparalleled’ in its sophistication.

Global recruitment

 

Nonetheless, due to this organized labor export, countries other than the U.S. began looking to the Philippines to fulfill their countries’ nursing shortages as well.

 

 

Today, the U.K. has approximately 18,500 Filipinos who work in its National Health Services; the United Arab Emirates has about 30,000 Filipino nurses; and with the rise of the global nursing shortages caused by the pandemic, European countries such as Spain and Germany had sought to recruit from the Philippines as well.

 

To stay or not to stay

 

The demand for Filipino nurses to work abroad, however, has drained our own supply, incapacitating our already fragile public health system.

 

Records show that because of the increasing number of Filipino health workers going to other countries, the health professional to patient ratio in hospitals can be as worrying as one nurse to 60 patients.

This disproportionate ratio is made worse by COVID-19.

 

As such, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, announced the temporary ban of medical frontliners from leaving the country.

 

The POEA order stated that “it is of paramount national interest to ensure that the country shall continue to have, sustain the supply of, and prepare sufficient health personnel to meet any further contingencies.”

 

Rosie De Leon, the president of the Philippine Nursing Association, had said that if nurses were to be forced to work in the country, they should be compensated properly.

 

She also tells me that even without the pandemic, if we want for more Filipino nurses to stay, their salaries need to be improved.

 

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