By Helen Castano, Marisol Bo-oc | 12:00 PM June 22, 2021
Bohol 3rd district Rep. Alexie Besas-Tutor has appealed to the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to lift the 11-year old ban on new nursing programs in the country.
Tutor asked CHED to review its Memorandum Order 32, series of 2010 on the moratorium.
She said the problem was not on the number of nurses, “but more of low wages and benefits, as well as delayed payments of those wages and benefits.”
Tutor said because of the ‘oversupply’ of nurses, the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector has become the “second option’ for thousands of nursing graduates and board passers ‘unable to find gainful employment.”
“There is a wide disparity between labor working conditions in government hospitals compared to private facilities,” she also said.
The lawmaker, who serves as vice-chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Health, lamented that hospitals have become mere preparatory ground ‘for eventual seeking of overseas jobs.’
” The pandemic experiences of the emergency hiring of nurses, [medical technologists], contact tracers, and [barangay health emergency response teams (BHERTs)] are dismaying proof of how poorly the government treats health professionals,” she said.
Tutor suggested that the lifting of the moratorium be done gradually, starting with addressing the shortages of nurses in key cities and provinces and meeting the ‘high global demand for different categories of nurses’ for the current and future pandemics.
The CHED can likewise start by allowing the opening of new nursing programs in Level 4 and Level 5 state universities and colleges, private colleges and universities with autonomous and deregulated status, and centers of excellence in nursing education, she said.
Tutor said CHED might want to require or encourage nursing colleges to offer foreign language courses. Perhaps there can be elective subjects on intensive mastery of English, German, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Hindu, and some of the languages in Africa.
“This particular action would be the quickest to execute because these categories of higher education institutions are of the highest quality,’ Tutor, a member of the House Committee on Higher and Technical Education,” Tutor said.
She said the offering of new programs should be one to two years from now or by 2023 at the latest ‘to allow for the conduct of detailed studies to ascertain the specific labor supply needs’ in the Philippines and globally.
“We want the lifting of the nursing program moratorium to be evidence-based, not merely anecdotal or general suppositions,” she said.
