Senator Imee Marcos recommended on Thursday to include pledge-of-service arrangements in scholarship programs for nurses beyond the stopgap measure of resetting deployment limits.

She said this long-term solution, to which the Philippine Nurses Association agrees, will give nursing students the educational security they need while the country can expect a steady workforce of new nurses each year.

“Until such incentives can be legislated, the government should not curtail a nurse’s choice to leave for work overseas,” Marcos said in a statement.

A legislative measure, which Marcos said can convince Filipino nurses to stay in the country, is for Congress to raise their salary grade in private hospitals to Level 15 or a minimum of PHP35,097.

The lawmaker said the Department of Budget and Management should rethink its policy of excluding contractual nurses from the salary upgrade and for the Department of Health (DOH) to prioritize them for regular employment.

“Even contractual nurses were tried and tested during the Covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Buwis-buhay din sila gaya ng mga regular (They also risked their lives like regular nurses),” she said.

Marcos said Congress can also give permanence to healthcare workers’ special risk allowances, which will expire when the state of public health emergency ends on December 31.

With final budget deliberations to begin in November, she urged fellow lawmakers to support these proposed reforms for the nursing profession.

She said this in anticipation of “inseparable public health and economic challenges” in the months to come wherein the global nursing shortage, which the International Council of Nurses put at 17 percent, has created higher-income opportunities abroad for Filipino nurses.

However, Marcos warned that their departure will weaken the country’s ability to cope with public health emergencies during pandemics and natural calamities.

According to DOH data as of September 30 this year, the Philippines is short by about 106,000 nurses while the Hamburg-based survey and statistics firm Statista reported that the country only had 8.03 nurses for every 10,000 Filipinos which is only 29 percent of the ideal nurse-to-patient-ratio of 27.5 : 10,000 as stated in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

“Our own shortage of nurses and the fear of an unforeseen pandemic or widespread natural calamity like an earthquake call for their presence here. On the other hand, they are breadwinners helping their families cope with the ever-rising cost of living,” Marcos said.

With the Philippine peso seen to weaken further against the dollar in the coming months, the senator acknowledged that nurses’ remittances would help shore up the country’s foreign currency reserves.

The government is still calibrating its policy on nurse deployment abroad amid conflicting recommendations from the Health and Labor departments regarding the annual deployment cap of 7,000 nurses.

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration told Marcos’s office that, as of the second week of October, the average monthly deployment of about 500 nurses left some 2,000 slots open for the rest of the year. (PNA)