Where to now, nurses?

The proposal by the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) for nursing graduates to seek jobs in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has driven home the reality of the country’s surplus of nurses and their inability to find employment at home or abroad.

It wasn’t too long ago that there was an overseas employment boom for nurses in the United States and Europe. The course itself attracted legions of  students who saw it as their ticket to a high-paying job and a life abroad.

Things changed in 2006 when the leakage controversy in the nursing board exam broke out, causing medical institutions in the US and Europe to back off hiring  Filipino nurses, who are considered  the best in the world.

That incident along with the 2008 global economic crisis slowed the overseas demand for nurses. They eventually  found themselves scrambling for jobs in local hospitals that were already staffed with veterans.

But still they searched for jobs and the DOLE’s suggestion for nurses to relocate to BPOs wasn’t anything new. The Technical Education Skills and Development Authority already has a medical transcription course for non-nursing graduates to fill in the existing demand for secondary outsourcing medical support services.

The DOLE suggestion for nurses to transfer to BPO firms, while directly answering their need for stable, high-paying jobs, may not be the best solution to addressing the glut in nursing graduates.

Militant groups called on the government to send these  nurses to the countryside where the need of indigent rural families is acute.

But while there is a government proram requiring doctors and nurses to render service in rural  communities, there’s a very limited budtet for that, let alone to build more district hospitals.

The BPO industry is not recession-proof; US President Barack Obama’s pledge to save  American jobs and discourage outsourcing meant these companies will have to diversify elsewhere. While  medical science terminology is universal, the language barrier may pose a problem for Filipino nurses already steeped in American English.

So until the national government, including more economically stable local government units,  allocate a budget to hire nurses in district hospitals and health centers, they may as well content themselves being employed as overseas secretaries encoding medical reports and histories for overseas hospitals.

Which, sadly, is a dumbing down of what  nurses were   originally trained to do: care for the ill and the needy.