From across the Philippines, they gathered to pray by Zoom. They were praying to be allowed to leave: To be allowed to take up nursing jobs in countries where the coronavirus is killing thousands in hospitals and care homes.
In recent months, these care workers have taken to calling themselves “priso-nurses.” With infections also surging in the Philippines, the government in April banned health care workers from leaving the country. They were needed, it said, to fight the pandemic at home. But many of the nurses on the two-hour Zoom call on August 20, organised by a union and attended by nearly 200 health workers both in the Philippines and abroad, were unwilling to work at home.
They said they felt underpaid, unappreciated and unprotected.
Nurses have been leaving the Philippines for decades, encouraged by the government to join other workers who send back billions of dollars each year.
With COVID-19 sweeping the globalised economy, the Philippine ban squeezed a supply line that has sent hundreds of thousands of staff to hospitals in the United States, the Gulf and Britain, where some commentators have called the nurses “unsung heroes” of the pandemic.
The Philippines’ health care system is already short-handed. In Germany there are 430 doctors and nurses per 10,000 people, in the United States 337 and in Britain 254, International Labour Organization data shows.
The Philippines — where the coronavirus death rate is one of the highest in Southeast Asia — has 65.
The April ban has stopped more than 1,000 nurses from leaving the country. Of those, only 25 have applied to work in local hospitals, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told journalists late last month.
The Department of Health did not reply to a request for an updated figure. The government has since partially eased the restrictions, but sometimes also tightens them, so nurses are still clamouring to get out.
On the Zoom call in August, someone played a recording of the Philippine national anthem. A Catholic priest prayed and a man with a soft voice crooned a song about passing off your burdens to God.
One nurse, 34-year-old April Glory, had already spent years away from her young son and had been about to leave again when the ban kicked in. Even before the pandemic, she said separately, she was better off in a war zone in the Middle East than at home. Soon after she arrived in Yemen in 2011, a bullet pierced the wall of her private hospital, she said.
Staff moved patients to safety. Still, she said, “we were insured, we had free lodging so my salary was intact and I could send more to my family.” Abroad, there was no need to do any work outside her job description: “You are not expected to sweep the floor.”
It’s mainly money that drives the Filipinos abroad. A nurse in the United States can earn as much as $5,000 per month; in the Middle East it’s $2,000 per month, tax free. — Reuters
In Germany, nurses can earn up to $2,800 per month, and get language training, labour organisers, recruiters and the Philippine government’s overseas employment agency say. Even with its emergency hiring efforts, the Philippine Department of Health is only offering nurses a starting salary of $650 per month. It says it will pay another $10 per day as COVID-19 hazard allowance.
Private nurses sometimes make just $100 per month. “I felt that I was not earning enough,” said Glory, explaining why she left. Her son, now 11, was a year and a half old at the time.
“My mother told me: Better to leave now because my child will not really remember.”
Abroad, Glory’s shifts were a standard eight hours and she only looked after one or two patients at a time in intensive care. — Reuters
Karen Lema & Clare Baldwin
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