RP’s healthcare profession deteriorating

To stay at par with the competitive global medical industry, Filipino nurses needs to improve on their clinical skills and to suffice the deteriorating medical education system of the country, nursing review centers are being required to provide holistic and quality learning experience to would-be nurses, a home-grown Filipino nursing review center told reporters in a press conference held recently.

“Our healthcare skills are deteriorating so there is a grave need to elevate the quality of nursing education that we provide,” stressed Jerome B. Mansibang, the founder and Academic Director of Edgeworth Review and Educational Center which will be opening a franchised branch here in Cebu.

Clinical skills are basic nursing skills such as interpreting electrocardiogram (ECG), reading X-ray results and conducting basic nursing services such as getting patient’s blood pressure (BP), said Mansibang.

He also cited some cases that happened abroad which resulted from this lack of clinical skills. He said that some Filipino nurses were brought back to the country from Saudi Arabia and Australia because of their inability to perform appropriate basic clinical procedures.

As was evident in the recent 2006 Nursing Licensure Exam leakage and low passing percentage in previous examinations, Mansibang stroked-out the fact that the country’s health care educational system has since degenerated translating to a deteriorating health care profession.

Also, the proliferation of health and medical care facilities like mushroom these days has engraved great damage to the country’s quality of education, said Mansibang. “Medical and healthcare facilities becoming a business accepting just about everyone and anyone who has money to spend, is one of the factors that lead to the deterioration. The government should have intervened before it happened so we could maintain the standard and quality of education,” Mansibang pointed out.

Mansibang stressed the crucial role that review center plays in patching up the result of the decaying educational system in the country’s health care profession. But in most cases, he said review centers now a days accommodate about 1, 000 to 2, 000 reviewers in one venue, which is not at all beneficial for reviewers as they are not given a holistic learning experience.

“We should maintain the quality and not lost the leadership to produce very good nurses,” he said. Mansibang also said that in the global arena, Filipino nurses are slowly left behind by our other Asian neighbors like India and China, especially that English proficiency is no longer our competitive advantage.

Edgeworth Review and Educational Center is only one of the two of the country’s nursing review centers accredited by the Commission on Higher Education. Banking on their core competencies as their edge amongst the ever-growing population of review centers in the country, they are advocating the development of the country’s healthcare services.

Having received about 20 to 80 emails requesting they operate in Cebu, Mansibang decided to open a franchised branch here in the area which will be accepting its first batch of reviewers for this April review classes. As a gateway to the different provinces in Visayas and Mindanao, Mansibang pointed out that Cebu is a strategic destination to operate another Edgeworth branch.

The three-story facility in Urgello is still undergoing renovation and will be ready this March, said Brent Ngoboc, the Edgeworth Cebu branch administrator. He revealed that Phase 2 of their operation will be the construction of a study center that will provide a venue for learning to Edgeworth reviewers as well as other nursing students and next to that would be a housing facility for reviewers which will depend upon the number of enrollees they will generate once their operation intensifies in the area.