RP nurses have no reason to be jobless

pinkroyalty18, LPN, LVN · Oct 3, 2008

hah,easy for them to say that we can always apply overseas...Dr. Tan clearly did not include factors such as "paid" work experience,visa retrogression,etc... Sure,there are still demand for nurses but the question is "do unexperienced and newly grad nurses qualify"?

dhel28 · Oct 3, 2008

An exerpt from www.gmanews.tv
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/124572/RP-nurses-have-no-reason-to-be-jobless
MANILA, Philippines - A former health secretary said aspiring overseas Filipino nurses who recently passed the board exams but have remained unemployed in the country were not resourceful enough to look for job vacancies.
Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Public Health, said there is no reason for Filipino nurses to feel that there are no job opportunities for them when there remains a high demand for Philippine health workers overseas.
"Resourceful nurses go to the Internet where they can apply and be immediately interviewed through the webcam," Tan said.
Unfortunately, said Tan, even the best nursing schools in the country have not taught resourcefulness among its students.

Talking about being out of touch. Is this Dr. Tan from this planet? or at least from the Philippines? These are the kind of sweeping statements of "there's a lot of nursing requirements abroad" US needs 300,000RN, this country needs this much, that makes a lot of people blindly take up nursing.

"Resourceful nurses go to the Internet where they can apply and be immediately interviewed through the webcam," Tan said. what a naive remarks, scary coming from a govt official. :banghead:

orangestar · Oct 4, 2008

People like Dr. Tan are really really out of touch with what is happening with nurses here in our country! If they only knew how much perseverance and patience it takes with finding a job as a staff nurse if you don't have any connections. I wish they could open their eyes to reality before making any statements like that :no:

lien17m · Oct 4, 2008

Has he done his research??? i mean his from UP... is he serious??? infact, he doesn't even have to.. he can just look at the rising number of new graduates plus the jobless ones lurking around the country hoping to get atleast a trainning slot from any hospital who wants to take advantage out of the high number of applicants... just to get an experience for future...staff position or perhaps ... use as a job experience for overseas jobs...

Clearly he left out ,... the qualifications that foreign nurses must comply to get a job overseas...how does he suggest to move this rising number of nurses without experience to work outside that instant??..Not to mention, the retrogression,and monetary reasons to find a job.??.. Now then, he is in no position to tell ..... schools haven't been teaching resourcefulness....

He should have been resourceful himself to take a closer look at the reality among new nurses in the Philippines....

misspowers · Oct 4, 2008

Leave the poor old man...HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT!!!! He is stuck with his era..."Sir its 2008 maybe you're having delusions of the circa 50's bwahahaa"

Ginger's Mom, MSN, RN · Oct 4, 2008

If this was posted in my area I would do 2 things, one call the station that posted this article and then write a letter to the editor. The more that question this the more they will have to retract the statement.

Also you will be doing a service to students thinking about entering an all ready saturated field.

pinkroyalty18, LPN, LVN · Oct 4, 2008

:rotfl: I had a good laugh reading all your comments...haha!

On a serious note,dhel is right..It is because of these sweeping statements from the media and govt that a lot of us jumped into nursing right away..I hope that media should really do their research first before they go on announcing to the the Filipinos that "country x has opened doors for filipino nurses" and all those crap....where infact,we wont be working as RNs there but nurse assistants!They are transmitting wrong information to the public!

rn4ever? · Oct 4, 2008

Dr. Tan could either be in denial or is moneyed and has "connections" that's why he's not in touch with reality.

purple_ylem · Oct 5, 2008

"not resourceful?!!"

almost every classmate and batchmate i know go to job fairs and nurse expos but are deemed "unqualified" because of lack of experience--which is translated to paid employment! some agencies and other employers are not considering "volunteer" nursing as equivalent to clinical experience (if only they knew that the only difference between a volunteer nurse and a hired staff nurse is that the volunteer doesn't get paid) :crying2:

"not resourceful?!!"

from where i come from, being a nurse volunteer only runs for three months (no salary/no benefits), and after that, if you're lucky you get to be proby (that is if there is vacancy, which only happens once in a blue moon). after your three-month stint you're out of there; in most cases the reason is to pave way to the next batch of volunteers! it seems that hospitals in my province never runs out of volunteer nurses...so ah...why should they really hire when they can get advantage of regular supplies of fresh grad nurses :confused:

i have two classmates who never got to be "absorbed" but has been rendering service for more than a year now...i mean like wow! more than a year of being a volunteer!!! they tell me they suck it up just to gain the experience (nobody's hiring them anyway, it's that or a slacker's life), and if they're lucky enough, they will find an agency or an employer who will consider their being a volunteer "an experience"...

"not resourceful?!!"

people should not just go public and say that nurses of today are "not resourceful" because as much as they want to get into a hospital to gain the needed experience to be qualified for the many nursing jobs that are offered abroad, not all hospitals can accomodate us all. but we try to find ways and means...we really do! :banghead: try try try...hope hope hope...

it's a jungle out there! kudos to all nurses :nurse: who brave it out! :bow:

13th stranger · Oct 5, 2008

what an ignorant comment from someone who supposedly knows the state of nurses. it's bordering on ridiculous.

what a shame. tsk tsk.

he should sign up to be a member of this online comunity so he could read and be updated by the real situation of real nurses.

Daly City RN · Oct 5, 2008

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I don't know Dr. Tan personally but I have read about him in the Philippine media and even seen him on a Filipino cable channel here in the San Francisco Bay Area. As expected, he talked about Philippine health care, and the state of Philippine nursing in particular.

I'm sure he knows a lot of things about the conditions in the Philippines but when he said that RP nurses have no reason to be jobless, then in my opinion he is probably becoming out of touch with the latest conditions in the nursing field in the Philippines.

Let us remind Dr. Tan that after foreign hospitals recruited tens of thousands of EXPERIENCED Filipino nurses several years ago, the result was that there was a short-lived shortage of experienced nurses in the Philippines. That well-publicised event resulted in the flocking of huge numbers of Filipinos enrolling in nursing schools. We are talking about in the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos wanting to become nurses in the hope of going abroad to work as nurses.

There is nothing wrong with becoming a nurse, but if your only reason in taking up nursing is to go abroad, then you may not have the right reason for going into nursing school. To be a good nurse you must have compassion, dedication, intelligence and a caring attitude. These are old fashioned values but they have worked very well since the time of Florence Nightingale.

There are now hundreds of thousands of unemployed Filipino nurses in the Philippines. Many countries with shortage of nurses must be envious of the Philippines, but as they say, the devil is in the detail. Unfortuntely many of these Filipino nurses graduated from diploma mills. They unfortunately are not qualified to work in modern western hospitals. Many can't even pass the Philippine nursing licensing examination!

The Philippines is now left with a huge number of unemployed Filipino nurses, and there are hundreds of thousands more in the pipeline that are going to graduate from nursing schools from all over the Philippines. Like it or not, the painful reality is that there aren't simply enough room to place all these nurses hungry for jobs in hospitals in the Philippines.

Volunteer work doesn't count as work experience, therefore these so-called volunteer nurses can't be hired to work overseas. To make matters worse, the European Union reportedly has stopped hiring nurses outside their borders, the U.S. is still in retrogression and Australia and New Zealand aren't big enough to absorb the hundreds of thousands of unemployed Filipino nurses. That only leaves the rich oil-exporting Middle Eastern countries that may still want to hire Filipino nurses.

I think the Philippine government should raise the standard of nursing education in the Philippines so that only the best students are accepted in nursing schools. The diploma mills must be closed and only the best nursing schools are allowed to operate. We may not see the result right away, but in the end the quality of nurses from the Philippines will once again become the envy of the world. Easier said than done in a country where corruption is rampant.

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