Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas

Editorial: More new nurses
Jimbo Albano / BusinessMirror

There’s a total of 39,455 brand-new nurses and, depending on your own perspective, that’s both good news and bad news.

It’s good news for those who burned the midnight oil for four years to obtain the Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree that would be their passport to a better life.

The latest nursing licensure exam topnotcher, Jovie Ann Decoyna, is a graduate of Baguio Central University and is a Kankanaey from the Cordillera. Her father is a farmer while her mother works for a Taiwanese family abroad.

Decoyna said she wanted to take up medicine because, as a doctor, she could help a lot of people. Later, realizing that her parents could not afford to pay for her tuition in medicine, she opted to study nursing instead. She said she plans to help her hometown instead of leaving the country to work: “Maybe I’ll go abroad in the future, but not now. I want to work in Baguio, give back something.”

The part about giving back something to her hometown is what makes the story of this year’s topnotcher worth telling, considering that the majority of those who take up nursing in the first place do so with visions of working in a foreign hospital, particularly the United States, where they can possibly earn a monthly salary that would be the envy of other professionals who choose to remain in this country.

That we have 40,000 more nurses this year is, at the same time, bad news. That means 40,000 more joining the army of the unemployed—at least for now. If we recall it right, roughly the same number of nursing graduates passed the 2007 licensure exam, but there’s a dearth of available slots in local hospitals that can absorb them, that so many nursing graduates take on various jobs, such as in call centers, while they try to meet the requirements for the coveted job in the US and elsewhere.

The bright side is that the international demand for Filipino nurses doesn’t seem to be waning despite the economic slowdown, according to the Board of Nursing of the Professional Regulation Commission. Europe, Saudi Arabia, Australia and New Zealand are seen as “fertile ground” for deployment of Filipino nurses in the years ahead. But we can only take advantage of these opportunities if we uplift our standards of nursing education.

Meantime, the government has come up with NARS, short for Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas, a training-cum-employment program for unemployed nurses to help them cope with the economic downturn. The nurses will undergo a six-month training in public-health services in the provinces where they will be able to do clinical practice under the supervision of participating hospitals. Five nurses will be deployed in each of the 1,000 poorest municipalities, and another batch of 5,000 nurses will be hired for six months after the first batch, according to the Department of Labor and Employment.

We don’t know how many of the recent passers in the nursing licensure exams would sign up for the NARS program. For one thing, the skills the nurse-trainees are likely to learn in the rural areas aren’t exactly those needed in advanced medical facilities in the US and Europe. Instead, militant health groups are asking the government to open plantilla positions in government health facilities for nurses.

Nevertheless, the NARS program is a small step forward in bringing adequate health care to the rural areas—and is exactly what nursing exam topnotcher Jovie Ann Decoyna envisions doing in the years ahead. There’s hope for this nation, after all.

Article Source: businessmirror.com.ph