Legislators, whether senators or congressmen, are like supermen. They all have the power to make laws that demand obedience from people and impose penalties on miscreants. But they are human as well. They do get sick from time to time. And when they get sick seriously enough to require hospitalization, they come under the care of other people.
To a large extent, being the very important personages that they are, legislators go to private hospitals rather than to those run by government. It is the thinking of many that good health is measured by the amount spent to acquire it. Rightly or wrongly, therefore, as one obviously gets to spend more in private hospitals than in government facilities, VIPs like legislators would rather come under hospital care in the former than in the latter.
At the hospital, be it private or government, a patient immediately comes under the care and monitoring of nurses. Doctors naturally find out what is wrong and then prescribe medication, outlining the manner in which treatment is to be carried out. But it is the nurses who must do the hard and often dirty job of trying to get a patient well and back to recovery.
The hospital environment is always engulfed in serious stuff, making it easy to miss the many other things that keep such an environment going and humming. The nurses, for example, without who running a hospital would be impossible. Yet for all the indispensability of nurses, nobody really cares about them, about whether they are paid commensurately for the work that they do, or even just in keeping with their dignity as professionals.
What is it with nurses, that while soldiers and policemen have got their pay doubled, or public school teachers getting higher entry level salaries with their private school counterparts about to follow suit with a bill filed for the purpose, their vital work in the care of human life gets completely ignored? What conspiracy is at work here? Is there a strong foreign lobby to keep nurses' salaries low in order to drive them to work for better pay overseas?
But not all nurses can or would want to work overseas. Besides, who will mind the store, so to speak, if they all go. To those who must stay for country and people, their contribution and sacrifice must be sincerely recognized and fairly, if not amply, rewarded. And that can only be done if our legislators themselves take up their cause and start taking nursing in the direction of parity with other professions in terms of dignified pay.
Teachers hold the future of the land in their hands by helping teach and mold the young. Soldiers and policemen protect the land and keep it safe for all citizens. It is only right and proper for government to pay them well. But what about the nurses? To be sure, a move has been made to raise the pay of nurses in government hospitals. But what about those in private facilities? Why the discrimination and unequal treatment?
Without meaning to wish ill on anyone, but maybe the next time a legislator checks into a private hospital, he or she might want to inquire from the attending nurse how much she or he gets in monthly pay. And when he or she finds out, it is hoped the revelation will lead to a measure that will finally put an end to the abuse and exploitation of Filipino private sector nurses in their own country by their own fellowmen.