 |
| 3 nurses resign daily from Heart Center to go abroad By JENNY F. MANONGDO Many have left, but there are those who come back too. The Philippine Heart Center (PHC) is not the least disturbed amid the growing number of specialists who are taking up nursing courses in search of greener pastures abroad. PHC Director Dr. Ludgerio Torres admitted yesterday that there were five specialists who had left PHC since last year to work as nurses in the United States. Among them were three anesthesiologists, one cardiologist and one pediatric cardiologist. These doctors, he said, worked at the PHC for the past 20 years but decided to leave to establish their families in the US. They are however expected to return to the country and to their profession, an act which he called "Brain regain." National Institutes of Health (NIH) data show that a total of 3,000 doctors and more than 50,000 nurses have left the country since 2002, the Health Alliance for Democracy (HEAD) cited. Torres said this situation is however not a cause for alarm as there are actually 500 specialists at the PHC. "This is just a drop in the bucket," he told reporters in a forum in Quezon City yesterday. He said these specialists are not really after the money because they were already earning an average of 500,000 pesos per month in the country. ‘’But it seems the lure of the immigrant visa awarded to foreign nurses in the US is the strongest factor why many Filipino doctors leave the country. They are earning but why did they leave? It’s more for their children, not for their financial capacity," Torres said. However, he said there is more difficulty in facing the shortage of nurses in PHC. About three nurses resign everyday from the PHC since 2002. "Others go on AWOL, others don’t bother to get their salaries and just leave. We used to have six open heart surgeries simultaneously in one day. However, since the shortage in nurses, we only do four open heart surgeries a day." Two nurses are needed for an open heart surgery procedure. Torres said there are currently 600 nurses in PHC. They need more mostly for critical care units. A regular nurse in PHC is required to handle two to three patients in a ward while those assigned in the critical care units handle only a single patient. Specialty nurses in PHC earn at least 15,000 to 18,000 pesos a month while an emergency nurse earns a basic of 10,000 pesos a month. "Our specialty nurses are those who leave. Those who are new are the ones that are left behind. It is the highly specialized critical care nurses who are the ones employed abroad," he said. "We still have to train the replacement nurses in our procedures. PHC is a tertiary hospital. Our nurses have to know how to read ECG, and what to do inside the critical care units. The most common errors in nursing is dosage, so we have to teach them. It takes six to eight weeks before a nurse can be oriented," he said. |
