NOWHERE TO TRAIN the Nurses!! The Philippine Star 09/08/08

450,000 nursing graduates have no great hope for 1-3 years of work experience needed before applying for overseas jobs at present!

....the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) reported that around 400,000 licensed nurses could not find employment locally as there are only around 60,000 nursing jobs available in the country. (click the title to read the complete article)

Message of false hopes I think the good commissioner PRC commissioner Ruth Padilla is missing a major point in the issue, and is sending a dangerous message to thousands of nursing hopefuls currently enrolled or about to enroll in nursing schools.

A crucial factor Padilla left out or failed to clarify is that nurses being sought after by such countries are those armed with a significant number of years of hospital and clinical experience. In contrast, majority, if not all of the 400,000 jobless nurses mentioned by the PRC are those who belong to the recent batches of licensure examination passers who are armed with nursing license and – nothing else! This is like training soldiers and sending them to battle without guns.

Nowhere to go In fact, several years of hospital experience alone isn’t good enough for foreign employers. Many if not all require a nurse to have warned her clinical experience in modern, tertiary hospitals. In Metro Manila, we only have a handful of modern tertiary hospitals. And the situation is worse in the provinces.

An innovative way employed before by rookie nurses in a bid to earn actual clinical experience was to apply as volunteer nurses. The ploy apparently was picked up by succeeding batches of newly-licensed nurses which resulted in a backlog even in the pplication for volunteer nurses.

Some newly licensed nurses lamented that even government hospitals are no longer interested in accepting volunteer nurses due to lack of qualified nurse-instructors and supervisors to look after the trainees and volunteers. Woe! Even for free, thousands of nurses cannot get their hands wet with actual hospital work.