300 nursing graduates hired to fill nurse gap, says Palace advisory council

Filipino nurses tend to patients in a hospital. (REUTERS FILE PHOTO)

MANILA, Philippines — At least 300 nursing graduates with no professional licenses had been hired under a new government program to fill the gap in nurses, said a Palace advisory body on Friday, February 23.

Positions called Clinical Care Associates (CCA) had been created to be filled by nursing graduates who have not passed the board exams yet, according to the Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC).

In 2023, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the PSAC, the Department of Health, and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) which would give work to yet unlicensed nursing graduates.

READ: Government launches Clinical Care Associates program

Health Sector Lead Paolo Borromeo said CHEd chair Prospero De Vera had proposed 1,000 CCAs “but now it’ is just 300.”

“A thousand CCAs is not a small number in a country where we graduate about 7,000 to 10,000 nurses yearly,” said Borromeo, president and CEO of Ayala Healthcare Holdings Inc., at a meeting with Marcos.

The program also seeks to increase the number of nurses by providing them with more skills. The CHEd also shortened the Masters’ Nursing Program from three years to just one, allowing more graduates to teach.

READ: CHEd eyes creation of healthcare assistants to ease nursing shortage

“It allows our…those nursing graduates who have taken their boards and have not been able to pass the board this time, will be allowed to work nonetheless if they can establish their competencies in certain subjects of the nursing curriculum,” Marcos had said during the MOU signing in 2023.

“And that way, they can get to work immediately,” he said.