Focus Special Report
Filipino nurses:
our fastestgrowing nursing workforce
Filipino nurses are fast becoming a mainstay of the New Zealand health and aged care sector. FIONA CASSIE gained some insights into the nursing culture in the Philippines – a country estimated to have up to a staggering 200,000 unemployed nurses – during a brief visit to Manila, including why we shouldn’t take this workforce for granted.
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hen Dr Teresita Barcelo’s nursing classmates have their reunions they choose Las Vegas or New York. With 90 per cent of the former Philippine Nursing Association president’s class living in the States, they argue it just makes sense. The Philippines is a country whose economy has long been bolstered by an estimated 10 million of the 100-million-plus Filipinos living and working abroad sending money home to their loved ones – around US$2.5 billion a month. Filipino nurses began arriving in New Zealand in increasing numbers towards the end of the last decade, helped by a major glut of Filipino nursing degree graduates unable to find work in the traditional mecca, the US. At the same time, interest from New Zealand’s traditional source of migrant nurses, the UK, dwindled (see Table 3, page 11. Fiona Cassie and Teresita Barcelo. 8 Issue 2 2017
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Philippine-trained nurses have very quickly become a quarter of New Zealand’s IQN workforce and in 2015 made up six per cent of the total nursing workforce. In addition, an unknown number of Filipino nurses, without New Zealand registration, are bolstering the caregiver workforce in the residential aged care and home care sectors.
Call centres staffed by unemployed nurses That person politely answering your query about a phone account or mobile plan may well be a nurse. Call centres in the Philippines are one of the biggest employers of nursing graduates unable to get nursing jobs either in the Philippines or abroad. The exact number of unemployed nurses in the Philippines is unknown but the Alliance of Health Workers union and others have estimated that a glut of up to a staggering 200,000 nursing graduates have been unable to find nursing work in recent years. Most of these underemployed nurses graduated in the midst of a nursing school boom that started last decade when they enrolled with the dream of well-paid nursing jobs in the US – like their cousins
or aunts – but ended up instead working in call centres, health spas and department stores. Dr Cora Anonuevo, a retired nursing professor and a current member of the Philippine Board of Nursing (the equivalent of the Nursing Council of New Zealand) says that nursing education in the Philippines is unfortunately market driven. The upsurge in demand for places in the first decade of the new millennium saw nursing schools mushrooming from around 300 turning out 20,000–30,000 graduates a year to about 500 schools in 2010 producing around 80,000-plus graduates a year. To put this in proportion, Anonuevo says the Board of Nursing estimates that currently there are about 186,000 actively practising registered nurses in the Philippines; a further 280,000 Philippine-trained nurses are believed to be working abroad. Getting a clear picture of how many licensed, i.e. registered, nurses are actually nursing in the Philippines is difficult. Until this year, nurses were not required to be actively practising to apply for the threeyearly renewal of their professional identification card – or to provide employment details.