Not just Philippine Doctors....

mtreyes · Apr 23, 2006

From The April 16, 2006 issue of the Manila Times and ABS-CBN Interactive

Understanding a multidisciplinary brain drain

SUNDAY STORIES

By MARLEN V. RONQUILLO

The overall health sector environment is discouraging, as messy as the comfort rooms in most government-run hospitals and as impoverished as the hospital linen. Ours is probably the only Asian country with an almost ruthless disdain toward its health sector and its health workers.

Marcial trained at San Beda in the mid-eighties to be in politics. There was no other career choice. Politics was his passion, his life. He promptly joined the staff of a prominent senator after graduation, starting out as a young, earnest aide, then moving up to more senior posts.

He covered most of the country in the three campaigns he was in; foreign travels took him to the US and elsewhere. He had lived his dreams so to speak. But three years ago, at age 30 plus, he made a decision that was totally unexpected. He quit his Senate job and the world of politics to go back to school. Today he is a nurse and, soon, he would be leaving permanently for the US.

The unstoppable exodus of the country’s nurses, which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears could wreck the country’s health infrastructure, has not really been pictured in its disastrous scope and breadth. This is probably one of the few problems that the media have kept understated. The problem is not confined to career nurses who leave and abandon the country’s health infrastructure for good. The brightest young men and women from other professions have been shifting to nursing—also to leave for good.

Engineers, accountants, IT experts, doctors and even political operatives like Marcial no longer think twice about going through a capping ceremony and doing hospital rounds to be a nurse, not as a nurse in our dilapidated, run-down state hospitals or the plushy private ones that charge high but pay its workers low but a nurse in foreign hospitals.

The powerful lure of nursing—and where nursing could take an ambitious and bright young man or woman—has attracted the best and the brightest from other disciplines and professions as well. What is being sapped is not only the precious manpower resource in the crucial health profession. The attraction of nursing has in reality been resulting in a multidisciplinary brain drain.

But then, why should they remain here and not seek pastures elsewhere? Good question.

There is no incentive to remain here, only a long list of disincentives. The country is an economic basket case and, politically, it is nearing the status of a banana republic. As to the status of its culture and the arts, you are reminded of Mencken’s description of the state of arts, culture and general enlightenment in America’s Deep South. Routinely, we are described in the foreign media as corrupt, violent, ungovernable. Earnings from our human exports outpace the earnings from other exports and the yearly foreign direct investments.

This is a sad, dirty, pathetic country, struggling and hurting while most of Asia is enjoying an unprecedented boom.

What about the pay, the compensation? Ruth Padilla, the dedicated nurse-wife of former Rep. Caloy Padilla, probably had logged more lobbying hours than Tom de Lay’s friends, but still she was not able to convince the budget people to implement a law that grants nurses in government hospitals and centers a meager minimum pay of P13,000 ($250) a month. From 2002 to 2004 Mrs. Padilla buttonholed every budget official she knew with a very just and timely appeal—please implement the new pay level for state nurses.

The few times I saw Mrs. Padilla, there was always frustration, even anger, written on her face. You can understand the frustration. Why can’t the budget people give money to increase the pay of nurses by a bit when we can squander billions in the name of profligacy and. corruption?

It makes no sense—a government that cannot even grant its nurses the equivalent of a survival pay scale. To think that these are the same nurses who are offered impossible perks and pay in US hospitals, starting with signing bonuses that can go as high as $50,000.

Don’t blame the nurses who leave and leave for good. This is, after all, a sad country whose level of health investment is not even 1 percent of the country’s GNP. The overall health sector environment is discouraging, as messy as the comfort rooms in most government-run hospitals and as impoverished as the hospital linen. Ours is probably the only Asian country with an almost ruthless disdain toward its health sector and its health workers.