Help wanted: 500,000 nurses

With people exasperated with his plan to free 122 Chinese poachers in Palawan, Foreign Sec. Blas Ople claimed he was only doing his job. "We respect the judicial process," Ople acknowledged the Navy’s reluctance to release the poachers since they’ve already been charged in court. "But at the same time, there is merit in the request of the Chinese embassy to fast-track the hearing which has been pending for several months."

Palawan folk don’t buy that. They, too, want trial to move post-haste. Problem is, they say, the poachers themselves delayed it by asking for a reinvestigation right after their case was brought to court. This means trial can’t proceed; the justice department instead must review the charges filed by the provincial prosecutor earlier this year. So if Chinese officials must blame anybody, it’s their own nationals.

Besides, environmen-talists say, the foreign secretary’s job is to assert RP interests foremost, not China’s. They find it strange that Ople wants to free the poachers to ensure the attendance of China’s Con-gress chairman Li Peng in a Manila conference of Asian legislators. If Li doesn’t attend on account of the jailed Chinese, that’s his problem. Let him risk the ire of his fellow-Chinese parliamentarians who wish to forge closer trade ties with East Asian countries.

Those poachers were not arrested in disputed Spratly waters in the South China Sea. They were caught netting dolphin at Tubbataha Reef, in RP’s inner Sulu Sea between Palawan, Negros and Zamboanga. The reef is a national marine park and U.N. World Heritage Site. Not even Filipinos may fish in the area patrolled by Marines and the Coast Guard.

The poachers use dolphin as bait for shark, from which they cut fins for soup. Records show that most of the 122 were repeat offenders, arrested twice or thrice before also at Tubbataha but freed on China’s intercession. Taken from them were giant pawikan (sea turtle) and prized mameng and lapulapu fish, along with buckets of cyanide and crates of dynamite. They poison and blast the fish from the reef to the surface, unmindful of killing corals around which fish spawn, feed and grow.

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We’ve all heard about it: A US hospital takes out help-wanted ads in Manila papers for rush employment of nurses. Of hundreds who line up for interview, only a handful pass the qualifying exams. They instantly get signing bonus of $10,000, equivalent to two months’ pay. The employer helps relocate their families in six months instead of the usual wait of two years. The local recruiter walks home happy, too, with a finder’s fee of $2,000, plus $1,500 if the nurse stays in the US for six months, and $1,500 more if the recruit stays a year.

Filipinos are the first choice of US hospitals. (Indians are next.) They know from experience that Filipinos not only speak good English but also have better bed-side manners. It’s probably cultural; Filipinos genuinely care for their fellows. The American Hospital Association counts 126,000 vacancies for nurses in all 50 states. Old-folks homes and community, school and factory clinics need 75,000 more. The figures,according to US health experts, could triple in the next decade as baby-boomers age.

RP can cash in on the US shortage, but can’t. "The problem is our own low supply of qualified nurses," laments Alan Ortiz, a director of Grow Inc. that needs to send 2,000 nurses for one contract in Nevada alone. The state’s hospitals need 6,000 this year. If local head-hunters like Ortiz are turning frantic, so are US hospitals and recruiters. The CGFNS exam is so tough even the top graduates of RP nursing schools don’t make the grade.

The US shortage arose from a shift in the ’90s of its health system to managed care. Hospitals merged, nurses were laid off to cut costs. Those retained found themselves working longer hours, handling more patients. By the time hospitals felt the need to hire again, many nurses had moved to other fields or to less stressful jobs in doctors’ offices, pharmaceuticals and neighborhood clinics. And since Americans shunned nursing courses during the lean years, they’re now offering the sun, the moon and the stars to overseas recruits.

The US is not the only land in dire need of nurses. Australia, New Zealand, Saipan, Japan, Korea, Britain, Norway, Ireland and the Middle East have fast-aging, slow-growing populations. Ortiz estimates another 300,000 vacancies there. The scarcity is so acute that European hospitals have taken to pirating Filipino nurses from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.

RP has only 350,000 registered nurses, and about the same number of undergraduates. To help fill the growing demand, Grow Inc. bought a nursing school to expand enrollment and set it to international qualifying standards. But that’s long-term. With just a dozen countries in need of half-a-million nurses, Ortiz says, several recruiters in Manila now offer short review classes for the CGFNS and NCLEX exams. Others tap doctors to switch careers via 18-month courses.

And that’s only for nurses. A parallel demand is for nurse aides, teachers and care-givers to handle classroom instruction (about $6,000 a month) and nursing homes ($2,000-$4,000). For such jobs, like for nurses, there’s no age requirement. "As soon as you qualify," Ortiz says, "off you go." But his Grow Inc. does not recruit non-nurses. His partners – among them former labor secretary Bienvenido Laguesma, former health secretary Alberto Romualdez Jr., former Petron CEO Monico Jacob, and educators Eusebio Tanco and Meliton Salazar Jr. – have their hands full meeting the orders for nurses.

More and more Filipinos are heeding the call, like thousands who are taking up computer and information-technology courses because of a similar rising demand. It’s said there’s at least one Filipino seaman in any of the thousands of commercial ships sailing the seven seas. Pretty soon, there’ll be at least one Filipino nurse in any of the world’s hospitals.

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