Saturday, August 07, 2004
Roperos: Doctors as nurses
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics also
There seems to be a bit of irritation and resentment among nurses working in our hospitals here regarding the fact that a good number of our practicing doctors have moved into their professional territory.
The feelings are said to have been aroused by talks about doctors having enrolled in nursing courses leading to a degree, a situation that may lead to an unfair overcrowding of the profession, thus placing practicing nurses at a disadvantage against the physician-nurses.
It seems strange that doctors now use their profession as their preparatory course to a nursing career. For that is really what it amounts to, since I learned that nursing study for doctors has been shortened to one or two years.
This is the rub, according to Chong Hua Hospital’s male nurse Andy Magbanua, who told me that many of his colleagues are unhappy that while they spent four years to get their diploma, doctors get theirs in just one or two years, depending upon the school they are enrolled.
He did not say, however, why the doctors are “behaving” the way they do, viewing the situation merely as a phenomenon that offers their profession an unfair competition since the doctors will surely be offering more expertise than they.
One nurse from Cebu Doctors Hospital was, however, more blunt about the reason why doctors are trying to get second courses. She said they are doing that to make it easier for them to get foreign employment, especially in the United States.
She said it is very difficult now to get into the US as a medical practitioner. American doctors are wary about getting competition from foreign medical graduates, even if the latter still have to pass a series of board examinations in the US before they can practice.
“The American medical association,” she said, “has become very powerful lobby group, protecting their turf. Many of the Asian doctors who were able to get in before the association felt the competition, were able to develop very good practice competing with the Americans.”
She said that later Filipino doctors were no longer granted visas to practice in the US. Those who were able to get in, did so as tourists or as potential business investors, or as nurses. This is how the ploy of going in as nurses begun.
Another lady nurse working at Chong Hua said that there are many doctors now enrolled in local nursing schools, although she did not give even an estimate.
However, according to an informant who does not want to be identified, there are doctors who are enrolled in a Samar nursing school, but their classes are held in Cebu on certain days of the week.
The problem, according to the nurse, is some enrollees do not attend classes regularly at all. They appear confident that, as medical practitioners, they can be better nurses.
After paying the fees, they go off, assured their medical training is far more extensive and stringent than the nursing course, and hence they are better prepared.
And it is this thought that somehow rubs the true nursing practitioners on the wrong side, so that many of them are nurturing secret resentment over the prevailing circumstances surrounding the profession.
While hospitals are feeling the pinch due to the loss of skilled and trained nurses to recruiters from the US and Europe, the nurses themselves are suffering a measure of wariness regarding the intrusion of doctors into their profession.
Many of them, according to Andy Magbanua, are hoping the government would step in and establish some kind of public policy regarding this phenomenon.
The point is not to prevent doctors from becoming nurses, but that the nursing profession should not be made a stepping stone or jumping board, so to speak, for the promotion of a medical practitioner’s domestic or foreign “material” advancement.
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/ceb...tics.also.html
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