Pinoys Dying From Lack Of Doctors
This was the first article that really caught my eye. Philippines, at present, is not that economically well-off. In fact, employment opportunities associated with the modern economy, mostly services and manufacturing, are concentrated in few urban centers, especially the Manila metropolitan area. The country’s high rate of population growth results in large additions to the labor force each year in an economy with a high rate of unemployment and even higher underemployment. The shortage of employment opportunities has resulted in large-scale migrations of Filipino workers, both sophisticated professionals and unskilled workers, to countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Former health secretary Jaime Galvez-Tan admitted that the widening demand for doctors in various developed countries is further worsening the doctor’s shortage. Foreign countries like Finland and France that were not recruiting doctors before are now offering $6,000 salaries for physicians and the Philippines cannot surely match that.
The number of unemployed nurses in the Philippines is also high. Indeed, hospitals and communities are complaining about the considerable lack of personnel but the state can not finance any further places of employment. If graduated nurses find a working place in their own country this is likely in private institutions However, in these institutions the salary is smaller than in governmental hospitals and there are often temporary limited contracts. Often nurses work without salary in hospitals in order to gain clinical experiences.
Come to think off it, if the government did their job well in improving the country’s employment status, there wouldn’t be any occurrence of problems such as this. In the provinces, treatable emergencies such as meningitis or strokes are often fatal, because there are no specialists to treat them. One of the reasons why doctors migrate is the fact that their own country cannot provide them...
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