MANILA, 5 August 2005 — Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said he might reimpose the requirement for medical graduates to serve in the provinces for two years before they could practice as doctors as a way to stopping doctors from abandoning their profession.
In a radio interview, Duque bewailed that more and more medical practitioners were enrolled in nursing school. He said some of these were mere graduates who had just passed medical school but there were some who were actually practicing physicians and some who were even specialists.
In an earlier press conference, Duque had pointed out that the Department of Health (DOH) found out that 6,000 doctors were taking up nursing this year compared to about 2,000 last year. “This is threatening the health care system,” Duque said, adding that the main ambition of most nursing students seemed to be to find jobs abroad where the pay was a lot more lucrative.
Duque said the DOH was now coordinating with Congress for a law that would require medical graduates to work for a specific period in the Philippines before leaving for further studies or settle abroad.
A DOH technical working group was considering the possibility of setting the requirement at one or two years, as proposed by sectors like medical societies, the official said.
“It is important to draft a bill and have it certified urgent (by the president) to address the migration of doctors,” he said.
But the vice president of the Philippine Academy of Ophthalmologists (PAO), Dr. Minguita Padilla, warned that merely putting a legal bind to keep medical professionals in the country might only discourage students from wanting to become doctors.
As it is, she said, there had been a steady decline in the number of enrollees in medical schools while some institutions had even been forced to close down.
“We have to make it attractive for them to stay in the country,” she argued.
Recruitment of nurses in Europe and in the United States has become so attractive because the nurses are offered up to P200,000 (roughly $3,500) a month salary. Many offer signing bonuses of up to $5,000.
Duque said he was open to the proposal that additional incentives be offered to doctors to keep them in the country. But in the end, he said the critical problem of migration in the medical profession would need a certain degree of sacrifice from doctors and nurses themselves. “We cannot stop people from seeking financial growth elsewhere but there should be a balance between individual human right and national interest,” he said.
Former Health Secretary Jaime Galvez Tan said Philippine nurses still consider the US as their top destination. The DOH estimates that there are now 782 Philippine nurses per 100,000 population in the United States.
Tan said an estimated 100,000 nurses left the country for various destinations abroad from 1994 to 2003, roughly half after the turn of the century. He also said US-based hospitals have been directly recruiting nurses from the Philippines, thereby bypassing the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) which reported a much lower figure of 84,000.
“The United States and the United Kingdom offer the best working conditions for Filipino nurses,” Tan said. Filipino nurses have been given immigrant visas for themselves, their spouses and their children, a work contract with sizable remuneration, and some even have housing grants.
Data from Philippine Nurses Association for 2002 place the number of nurses employed overseas at 170,000 and those locally employed at 26,669.
Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas said she was amazed when she met two nurses working in the United Kingdom while on vacation in Greece and learned their salaries were roughly P200,000 annually!
“While the Philippines traditionally produce a surplus of nurses for export since the 1960s, the large exodus of nurses in the last four years have been unparalleled in nurse migration history,” Tan said.
