Glut in Nursing: Who's next? Culinary courses?

I got a report that revealed that Filipino nurses seeking US jobs have dropped by as much as 52% in the first quarter of the year 2011 after sliding down by 37% in the year 2010. Nurses have become one of the country’s biggest group of unemployed skilled workers. That report pointed to only 1,454 Filipino nursing graduates that took the NCLEX exams as compared to the previous number of 3,024 in the same three month period.

In response to this problem, Congress is proposing an expanded version of the Nurses Assigned in Rural Services (NARS), a project designed to hire some 10,000 nurses to improve healthcare services in the countryside where there are a few nurses. As the report says, there are now tens of thousands of unemployed nurses in the country and they should be tapped to serve our nation’s healthcare needs.

I do not question this report, after all, my own daughter Katrina passed her nursing courses and her NCLEX, but alas, the United States, our biggest market for nurses has shut down their doors in a legal term called “retrogression,” whatever that means. While I agree with this plan to hire those unemployed nurses, we must first fix the problems in the Department of Education (DepEd) that allowed this glut to happen. But with so many culinary schools opening up in Cebu, I’m sure that this would result in a glut of chefs in the next couple of years. When will this imbalance end?

One major problem that needs to be addressed is reforms in the US Immigration, something that we wrote about last Friday that US Pres. Barrack Obama is proposing in this election campaign season. While waiting for that, I got a response to that article from a friend who lives in New York, who is currently in Cebu. So here’s his letter in full.

“Dear Sir Bobit:

You have an interesting article today at The Freeman talking about US immigration reform and whether or not, US Pres. Barack Obama would keep his election promise of getting serious on that very thorny issue. I agree with you that the US needs to have immigration reform. As a US immigration attorney, I see on a daily basis, the anguish, the pain and the anxiety suffered by the undocumented and even of the legal immigrants. Consider these:

 1. A talented and intelligent student was ordered deported because he does not have valid immigration status, though no fault of his own. His parents brought him in the US when he was still a small child. America is the only country he knew growing up, his family and friends are here, he does not know anybody in his parents’ home country. Where would he go and what would he do in a strange land?

2. A family separated for 5, 10 or even 20 years because of backlogs and quota on certain family based visa petitions. Or a child who was left by his parents in the Philippines because he turned 21 years old before their visa interview. That child is now under drug rehabilitation obviously a victim of lack of parental guidance. My office in Cebu has seen an increased number of inquiries on how to expedite their cases which have been languishing and may have been worthy of getting benefits out from the Child Status Protection Act.

3. What about the dreams of Filipino nurses and their parents? They send their children to these very expensive nursing schools only to find out when they graduate that the Phils does not have a job for them and that the US has visa retrogression despite the lack of healthcare workers. With the passage and implementation of the Health Care Reform Act, it is predicted that the US would have an increasing need for nurses, doctors, physical therapists, etc. 

I can go on and on about the reasons why the US needs a comprehensive immigration reform. While attaining it may prove to be complicated because of politics and clashing vested interests, the United States cannot always ignore this nagging problem. Any administration from either party would have to stop playing politics and make the hard choices. The sooner, the better.

Thank you very much for your article and enlightening your readers about this very important issue. Obviously, whatever benefits the US may gain out of the US immigration reform, Filipinos, undocumented or not, in the US or not, would also stand to gain a greater benefit.

Best regards,

Atty. Marco Tomakin, RN.,

Esq. The Law Office of Marco F. G. Tomakin

381 Delaware Avenue Delmar, New York”

What happened to nursing can be blamed on the wrong policies of our Department of Education (DepEd), which allowed too many nursing (even computer schools offered nursing courses) schools to operate. Methinks culinary schools are the next to over produce chefs that our local market cannot take in. DepEd should offer balanced courses and not concentrate only on one subject that students want to take.

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