Nurse-less

This is the specter haunting our health system: hospitals without nurses.

According to Health Secretary Ted Herbosa, the country could be nurse-less within three to five years. This is untenable.

To address the situation, the Health Secretary proposes hiring nursing graduates who barely missed passing the board. Specifically, he is targeting hiring nursing graduates who scored 70 to 74 percent in the board exams. They will be hired in government hospitals in supportive roles.

Our government hospitals need tens of thousands of nurses. There are tens of thousands of nurses who barely missed passing the exams or who are engaged in other jobs. The Health Secretary must give us a clearer idea of how he intends to sweeten the pot to attract nurses to the service. Eventually, we will have to attract our exported nurses to come back rather than rely on those who failed the qualifying exams.

The situation was not always this way.

For years we produced more nurses than we needed. Nursing schools proved profitable and sprouted everywhere like mushrooms. The lure was a job abroad where nurses are better compensated.

With a surfeit of nurses, we began treating them badly. Nurses had to pay hospitals to hire them as they accumulated work credits for foreign employment. In some hospitals, nurses were paid barely above the minimum wage. Because of this, many nurses took other jobs away from the medical field.

About a third of our nursing graduates work abroad where their talents were better compensated. A Filipina nurse in the UK, we will recall, was the first to administer a Covid-19 jab.

When the pandemic hit, many foreign nurses quit their jobs either because of overwork or the risks of infection. Demand for Filipino nurses peaked such that, for a while, our government thought of banning deployment to ensure we had enough critical personnel to meet the challenges the pandemic posed. That was an unconstitutional solution. In the end, if we are to meet our shortages of medical workers, we had to ensure their work is well compensated.

The pandemic might be subsiding, but the demand for Filipino medical workers continues to rise as countries expand their medical systems. That high demand will continue on for many more years.

Our nurses deserve better pay. They spent years training for what has now become a critical professional skill. Government will have to take the lead in improving compensation for a profession now in critically short supply.

Improving compensation will eventually raise the costs of health care in the country. But that is what the market dictates. We cannot try to keep our nurses by coercive means.

Suspiciously prompt

Our justice system, from prosecution to the courts, grinds exasperatingly slow. The backlog is long and the trial schedules even longer.

Among the priorities of the present Justice Secretary is to reform the National Prosecution Service (NPS). The objective is to speed up the process. The job of the prosecutorial service is to determine not only “probable cause” but also the “reasonable certainty of conviction” so as not to unduly burden the courts.

One prosecutor in the National Capital Region appears to have taken the reforms too seriously. Where it normally takes weeks and even months to evaluate carefully complaints before taking them to court, this prosecutor determined in only about 10 days the existence of probable cause. Compared to the normal processing time, this determination is exceedingly fast – but also suspiciously prompt.

This case involves a low-key but highly respected figure in the Filipino-Chinese business community. The complaint against the businessman and his associate, unlikely as it seems, was filed by the businessman’s estranged family. The breathtaking pace with which the prosecutor determined “probable cause” might have short-circuited the process which involves hearing out all sides to the case.

Friends of the businessman are aghast at the speed with which this complaint has been elevated to the courts. They fear the unusual speed with which the prosecutor arrived at a determination of the merits could invite trial by publicity, considering the prominence of the person accused.

The businessman is now seeking a review of this particular prosecutor’s speedy resolution of complaint. That review by the Department of Justice will probably require a lot more time than the prosecutor required to arrive at his resolution.

That review will also tax the resources of the Justice Department. But it is something that needs to be done in order to ensure the quality of resolutions formulated by prosecutors. Speed in processing complaints ought not to be at the sacrifice of excellence in prosecutorial judgments. Justice is not served by an army of hair-trigger prosecutors who evaluate complaints with indecent haste.

It would do well for Justice Secretary Boying Remulla to personally look into this instance for its suspicious promptness independent of the department’s review. There is danger that his call for speeding up the work of the National Prosecution Service is now used as cover for sloppy determination of “probable cause.” Or else the courts will be further burdened with loads of unworthy cases.

Surely the Justice Secretary, when he called for reforms, did not intend the National Prosecution Service to be merely an assembly line processing all complaints without due prudence and simply off-loading them onto the courts. We want our prosecutors to work faster without sacrificing prudence and solid judgment.

The immediate result of this case will, of course, be the flooding of the Department of Justice with petitions for review of prosecutorial decisions.