Are you a Board Passer Nurse Without a Job? Maybe You Also Lack Hospital Training and Experience.
Based on what has been reported in many news angle, it seems that the lack of training facility for nursing graduates such as local hospitals, including government-owned and controlled in the Philippines are producing more and more unemployed nurses.
Although many of our unemployed nurses passed the local nursing board, one of the key pain of nursing recruiters in the country is the lack of the nurses’ experience and training in actual hospital work. Without it, they cannot be endorsed to potential foreign employers who are seeking experienced nurses only.
The root cause of the problem is not the oversupply of nurses per se but the lack of government funding even to hire these nurses in the government-owned hospitals. If the government can allocate funds for this and provide even temporary employment to our nurses, then they can go out and find work elsewhere after.
The sad news is, there are reported cases that some new nurses are even sacrificing and more than willing to pay the local hospital just to admit them so they can have work experience in their resumes. This is becoming a trend and some folks are reported to be benefiting from it.
It is also well known that there are a lot of shortage of nurses and doctors in most of the government owned hospitals aside from the scary facilities that have not been refreshed for years due to lack of funding. Some patient are more afraid of contracting sickness inside government hospitals than their ailments.
We urged the Philippine government to look into this funding solution quickly. Adding necessary funding to local government hospitals so they can hire nurses (and doctors) to gain experience is a win-win trade off not only for the nurses but also for the sick Filipino folks as well.
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Review and Control of Nursing Schools in the Philippines by CHED is Being Pushed
Several concerned groups have been asking CHED to look closely into the review and control of nursing schools operating in the Philippines particularly those schools without proper training facilities and tie ups with local hospitals to train their graduates. This came after the oversupply issue on Filipino nurses raised concerns for more production.
CHED was quick to react that the commission cannot just close down a school just because it does not have connections with local hopsitals needed to train the future nurses. However, CHED realizes that indeed a lot of nursing schools have been performing below expectations and metrics set by the commission. CHED promised to act on these schools immediately.
In the meantime, thousands of board passers who studied from those ill-connected schools have no experience at all in the hospital environment making them inadmissible to foreign job opportunities. And for those lucky nurses who are able to get employment appears to have lack of experience in specialized fields like ICU, medical surgery, nicu, emergency, dialysis and cardiac care that are the most sought-after skills needed by foreign hospitals.
This problem will continue to grow if CHED will not act on it quickly.
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CHED Disapproves Ceiling Proposal for Nursing Students Enrollees to Curb Oversupply
COMMISSION on Higher Education (Ched) chairman Emmanuel Angeles denounced proposals imposing a ceiling on the number of college students that would like to take up nursing in an effort to put a halt on the oversupply of nurses in the Philippines.
CHED cited the that setting a limit to the number of enrollees to be accepted in the nursing schools all over the country will mean a violation of the basic human right to choose the education the students want to pursue.
About 470 nursing schools proliferate in the country with an annual enrolment of nearly 100,000. Only a handful of these schools are considered excellent by CHED with an annual passing rate of 90 percent. Last year, 64.909 nursing hopefuls took the board and eventually 31,000 of them passed.
CHED said that the only way they can limit the oversupply is to limit the nursing schools providing nursing courses. The most valid basis of barring a school from conducting nursing courses are lack of proper facility and incompetence of faculty members. However, we are yet to see these control measures being implemented in the school system.
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Online Nursing Programs Competes with Nursing Schools and Helps the Oversupply of Nurses
“I prefer to stay at home and study nursing online if possible”, says a Nursing student we talked to yesterday. “If there is only a way in the Philippines to study online nursing programs, that is acceptable to the governing bodies, then I prefer to do it online.” she added.
Certainly, there is a huge demand also for study-at-home nursing programs through the internet. Businesses have seen the need of desperate Asian homes to bring their kids to the nursing profession for later economic benefit and financial rewards by working abroad. This is happening worldwide as we blog. If you search the term “nursing online course” or “online nursing program” in Google, you will be hit it with a million results.
The continuing saga now in the Philippines is to alleviate the status of our unemployed nurses who have attended formal and normal nursing bachelor degree courses in a college or university. With the proliferation of nursing courses online, it will be hard to determine how much longer our fellow nursing citizens have to wait to reap the fruits of their 4-year diploma course because it can only mean one thing – more nursing graduates in the pipeline to trigger oversupply. This is clear competition and over competition will not benefit our nursing board passers.
The other competing Asian countries are also targeting nursing as a ticket to working abroad especially the US. They too are the prospects of these online nursing home study courses and nursing degree courses that almost anyone nowadays can take online and at the comfort of their own homes.
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