MANILA, 23 November 2005 — The Philippines, already saddled with massive closure of hospitals due to an exodus of doctors and other health workers, is hoping to send more Filipino workers abroad.
An action plan prepared by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the agency tasked to scout for overseas labor markets, said it is specifically eyeing 80,000 more workers to be employed in Saudi Arabia starting next year.
Labor Undersecretary for Employment Danilo Cruz said that the Philippines’ labor attachés in the Middle East have projected a total of 258,950 new jobs that would be generated in the region in the next three years.
Some 173,600 of these new jobs are projected to be made available in the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman.
Projected new jobs for Lebanon, Israel, Libya, and Jordan were expected to reach 85,350.
OFWs deployed in these countries totaled 347,311 or 98.56 percent of the total number of land-based OFWs deployed in the Middle East in 2004. They constituted almost half (49.3 percent) of the total land-based OFWs deployed globally last year, according to the Department of Labor and Employment.
In a report to Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas, POEA Administrator Rosalinda Baldoz said the plan is to promote higher skilled OFW-labor rather than just blue collar workers.
Baldoz said the plan involves several strategies designed to expand the traditional markets for Filipino labor to include fields other than hospital work, construction, household work and jobs in oil fields.
Hospital workers, including doctors, dentists, nurses, medical technologists and others, constitute one of the biggest group of Filipino workers in the Middle East.
The POEA's projection comes amid a cry of alarm that the continuing exodus of Filipino health workers for better paying jobs abroad has left only 700 private hospitals operational across the Philippines.
According to the Private Hospital Association of the Philippines (PHAP), some 1,000 private hospitals closed since the year 2000 due to lack of medical staff.
“We fear for the health of the people, especially those living in the countryside,” said Dr. Antonio Chang, president of the association, during the group's national convention at the Manila Hotel yesterday.
Chang noted that this month alone, 12 hospitals in different regions shut down, 11 other medical facilities closed in October and eight in September, indicating a collapsing local health care system.
Chang said that in Masbate province where he runs St. Anthony’s Hospital, two 50-bed hospitals have only one doctor each, a far cry from the required ratio of one doctor for every 10 beds.
So dire is the situation, he said, that in other hospitals, college graduates without any medical background are trained to work as “caregivers,” or medical aides, to fill the void left by the migrating doctors and nurses.
A few weeks ago, the Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) predicted that the country’s health care system would collapse in two years, pointing out that a total of 51,850 nurses had left the country for greener pastures abroad from 2000 to 2003 alone.
This meant that the Philippines had lost close to 13,000 nurses every year during that short period, according to Jossel Ebesate, AHW secretary-general and nursing supervisor at the Philippine General Hospital.
More than 5,000 doctors had also left for work abroad as nurses from 2000 to 2004. Many more want to leave. Some 4,000 licensed physicians are now enrolled in nursing schools, Ebesate said.
“We’re scared,” Chang said, noting that most of the hospitals that closed down had provided primary and secondary health care to the poor in the countryside.
Chang said health professionals were leaving private hospitals because the hospitals could only offer a monthly salary of between P15,000 and P18,000 for medical residents and about P8,000 for nurses. What's worse is that many Filipino doctors are taking up nursing just to be able to secure a job abroad.
A nurse in the United States and Canada could earn about $35 per hour or roughly $5,600 monthly (about P300,000).
“There is a real crisis,” said Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who was one of the guests during the PHAP’s national convention at the Manila Hotel yesterday.
Santiago said the hospitals closed down because they were no longer worthwhile business enterprises. “They were already doing the work of government, dispensing health care for free and no one can sustain that under their own resources.”
In her speech at the PHAP gathering, Santiago agreed to look into proposals to keep private hospitals going.
These include requiring the Department of Health to put up a recruiting center for hospital staff, banning strikes and pickets in all hospitals, and providing private hospitals in rural areas with a 20-percent discount on electric bills. Santiago agreed with Chang’s proposal that a government office settle the unpaid bills of poor patients and senior citizens. Chang lamented that many hospitals were burdened by unsettled promissory notes and post-dated checks.
“Understandably, hospital administrators hesitate to file a case for collection in court because of the additional expense in time and money,” she said. (With input from Inquirer News Service)
