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Petition for Increase Salary Wage for Private and Public Nurses in the Philippines

Living in this world, everybody seems to believe that there is no job that is easy. Everything is hard and difficult because you have to study for a lot of years before you master something. But if you love the things that you are doing, everything will be easy for you to go on until you’ve reach your final goal.

To be nurse is also a difficult job. You have to study for 4 years for you to graduate and then take a board exam. On that 4 years, students have to pay their tuition which sometimes cost them a leg per semester. They have to study and memorize many medical terms and functions. And they have to master everything that they do because mistakes are not acceptable. Mistakes may cost the life of a patient. 

And it’s no surprise that nurses in the Philippines have the lowest salary in Southeast Asia. This may be due to our corrupt government officials and their negligence when it comes to health care facilities. 

When Covid-19 Pandemic started it added burden to medical professionals specifically the Nurses, in every hospital they do have a called “rotation” where nurses are being rotated to different departments and also on the Covid-19 Ward, where positive patients of Covid-19 are admitted. Even without pandemic, Nurses already had a lot of complains about the salary that they receive every month. There are nurses that had lay-offed due to the low salary that they receive, and the job and obligations that they offer is already beyond on the job description that is stated. 

According to the investigation and interview of the News Reporter Mariz Umali of “24 Oras” the average salary of the government Registered Nurses in the Philippines ranges from P22,000 to P42,000 per month. If we compare the salary of the Nurses in the Philippines to other countries in Southeast Asia, we could say that the country of the Philippines has the lowest monthly salary given to the employed Nurses.

Nurses at the same level in Vietnam have a monthly salary of P62, 000 while nurses in Indonesia have a salary of P79, 000. In Thailand, nurses have a salary of P83, 000, followed by Malaysia with P97, 000, while nurses in Singapore have a monthly salary of P236, 400.

"The nurses were underpaid, overworked, and this is why we are calling for help especially on this time of pandemic, because they were already anxious, sick, and tired of doing their work" Filipino Nurses United (FNU) secretary-general Jocelyn Andamo said. 

He also stated that health care has never been prioritized in the country. Thousands of health workers, who call themselves "priso-nurses", had appealed to the government to let them take jobs abroad, Reuters reported last week. The nurses say they feel underpaid, under-appreciated and unprotected in the Philippines according to Karen Lema. 

There have been a proposed special provision in the 2021 national budget for the government nurses when their compensation adjustment is approved. We are all hoping that this proposed provision will be fully implemented to all nurses may it be private or public nurses. According to the Health Service Research, The Philippines is a job-scarce environment and, even for those with jobs in the health care sector, poor working conditions often motivate nurses to seek employment overseas. The country has also become dependent on labor migration to ease the tight domestic labor market. One out of every five employed workers is underemployed, underpaid, or employed below his/her full potential. As a result, the number of Filipinos working abroad has steadily risen and from 1995 to 2000; overseas deployment of workers increased by 5.32 percent annually.

Despite being undervalued, low-wage health workers make essential contributions during the pandemic and beyond. “Nobody is insignificant,” said Tony Powell, a 62-year-old administrative coordinator of a hospital surgical unit in Washington, D.C. “Without environmental service, without dietary, without secretaries, without medical and surgical techs and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), it wouldn’t be a hospital.” Home health workers, for instance, provide the first line of defense against COVID-19 for millions of elderly and vulnerable people living at home. Without that, the limited capacity of hospitals today would be stretched even further. 

Amidst our darkest hour and critical moment where our life is already in grave, our dear nurses and medical workers are the only hands that we can hold into. Time and knowledge that they sacrifice in order to revive and prevent death from us. No wonder why most of the countries such as England, UK, Dubai, and Singapore prioritized their Medical Staffs especially during this Pandemic. Proper treatment, equipments, and salary are the only things they shout for and a government especially the Philippines can always provide that if they wanted to. Let us help our Medical Staffs especially the Nurses to get what they deserved by signing up in the campaign. Through this, we both lend our hand to save them and also to save our economy.