Home 
MANILA, Philippines -- A group of recruiters has called on the government to reconsider a program under which nurses will be sent to the provinces to gain experience aimed at hastening their deployment overseas.
The Federated Association of Manpower Exporters (FAME) said on Sunday the P500 million allotted by the government for the Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas (NARS) program might end up being “a waste of taxpayer[‘s] money” since the “experience” the nurses would get in the provinces might not be recognized abroad.
FAME vice president Jackson Gan, in a statement, noted that under NARS, nurses would conduct physical examinations, administer injections and treat minor wounds in barangay (village) clinics and municipal hospitals.
Gan said hospitals abroad needed nurses trained in “specialty areas” such as surgery, burns, neonatal care, cardiac catheterization, cardiovascular diseases, pediatrics and nursery, as well as in emergency response, therapies and clinical wards.
These specialized nurses, he said, are “very much in demand” in the Middle East and Western countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
“The nurses who will be assigned to the provinces won’t be able to get the experience and training that urban hospitals offer in major cities of the country," he said.
"The NARS program is laudable since it will give poor people in the rural areas minimum medical care and temporary employment, but hospitals abroad need nurses trained in specific areas,” he added.
Gan said many hospital administrators in the Middle East and the US only recognize the training Filipino nurses obtain in such well-known local hospitals as St. Luke’s Medical Center, Asian Hospital, Medical City, Cardinal Santos Memorial Medical Center, Makati Medical Center, Manila Doctors Hospital, Medical Center Manila, Metropolitan Hospital, Philippine Heart Center, Lung Center of the Philippines, National Kidney Institute and a few established hospitals in Baguio, Cebu and Davao cities.
He said the government should, instead, give funding to the major hospitals so they could upgrade and expand their facilities and hire more nurses, who would then be trained in the work needed abroad.
“This is a much better way of helping the unemployed nurses instead of sending them to the provinces to do clinic work which is not a requirement abroad,” Gan said.
At present, more than 100,000 licensed nurses in the country are unemployed because hospitals, both private and government-owned, do not have the funds to hire them.
Most of these nurses cannot go abroad to work because they lack the two-year experience required by foreign hospitals.
