Philippines: Major Source of Nurses

Why the Philippines is a Major Source of Nurses for Many Countries

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) has cited the Philippines as the largest exporter of Nurses to foreign countries.Filipino nurses can be found everywhere around the world -- in the big cities of United States and Ireland, in urbanized centers of Europe and Asia, in the far corners of Africa and South America, in remote desert clinics and state-of-the-art hospitals in the Middle East. There are an estimated 786,000 Filipino Nurses working outside the Philippines, in about 116 countries .

Part of the reason for such popularity is the proficiency of the Filipino Nurse in the English language, today’s lingua franca of hospitals worldwide. The educational system for nurses in the Philippines mandates English as the medium of instruction. Moreover, the training of nurses features apprenticeship, laboratory work, experiments, residency and community-based projects --- all lectures and school work being done in English. Nursing programs in the Philippines have been certified to be equivalent to the education standards in the U.S. As many students there have been made aware of the vast opportunities in nursing, both at home and abroad, the Philippines now trains more nurses than she requires.

As of 2005, there are 1,789 nursing schools in the Philippines. They graduated more than 386,920 nurse-students that year. In 2005, 40,951 passed the two Board exams (June and December 2005). The number of these new nurses exceed the country’s nurse requirements. The excess number of nurses go overseas for work. By the time the Filipino nurse finish her nursing degree, she would have spent at least 10 years in school, being taught most of her subjects in the English language, instead of the local language. The fluency in English results in adaptability and shorter training period. Overseas employment for a Filipino Registered Nurse is not considered unusual but it regarded as an enrichment of professional experience.