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FILIPINO doctors and nurses are leaving, lured by better pay and working
conditions abroad. Pretty soon, the Philippines may also begin losing its
relatively small number of pharmacists.
Health experts warn of the looming exodus of the country’s pharmacists who
number no more than 4,000 today.
“It’s already happening,” Yolanda Robles, president of the Philippine
Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, said at a press conference yesterday.
In the past three years, the University of the Philippines lost 10 of its top
pharmacy professors to higher-paying posts in the same field in the United
States and Canada, said Robles, who is dean of the UP College of Pharmacy.
According to Robles, the United States alone will be needing some 60,000
pharmacists in the next 10 years.
Unlike doctors and nurses -- the health care professions where the brain
drain is most pronounced -- local pharmacists actually earn decent salaries,
probably better than they would pull abroad,
Starting salaries
At the Philippine General Hospital, pharmacists get a starting salary of
about P13,000 a month, she said.
A number of pharmacists, in fact, already enjoy incomes that are probably
higher than what they would get abroad because of the training, experience and
reputation that they have obtained right here in the country, said Robles.
Still, professionals will always want to aim for the highest salaries and
this was possible only in the more developed countries, she said.
On April, Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization’s regional director
for the Western Pacific, warned that the Philippines faced a health work force
crisis because of the unfettered emigration of doctors, nurses and other health
workers.
Best and brightest
Omi said that the Philippines was losing more than 15,000 nurses annually,
more than any other country in the world. Many of them are among the country’s
best-educated and most-experienced nurses, leaving a critical shortage of
qualified specialty nurses.
Not a few doctors in the Philippines are training for higher-paying nursing
jobs in the United States, the WHO official said.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III recently noted that around 6,000
licensed doctors were enrolled in nursing schools this year, more than double
the 2,000 doctors studying to become nurses last year.
The Alliance of Health Workers has warned that the country’s health system
faces collapse in two years as Filipino doctors and nurses leave for better jobs
overseas.
According to the Health Alliance for Democracy, a total of 51,580 nurses left
the Philippines from 2000 to 2003. The following year, around 5,000 doctors
chose to become nurses abroad.
The prospect of losing yet another vital sector of the health care
profession, pharmacy, is worrisome to health experts who note that the
Philippines is already battling the high cost of medicine and the proliferation
of fake drugs.
Normita Leyesa, the immediate past president of the Philippine Society of
Hospital Pharmacists, said a lack of qualified pharmacists could leave Filipinos
at the mercy of people who are not competent to dispense medicine.
She noted that drug stores were not allowed to operate without a supervising
pharmacist.
A lack of pharmacists would hamstring the state-run “Botika ng Bayan,” a
program aimed at making essential drugs affordable to poor people by selling
cheaper medicine mostly imported from India and Pakistan.
Under the program, the government offers attractive financing plans to
entrepreneurs interested in operating small drug stores.
In the absence of a law regulating drug prices, Leyesa said the Botika ng
Bayan could help encourage transnational drug companies to “lower their prices.”
Leyesa is a member of the multisectoral technical working group studying drug
price regulation to help Congress come up with appropriate legislation.
Another year of nursing
In a move to arrest what it said was the declining quality of nursing
education in the country, a technical panel of the Commission on Higher
Education (CHEd) has recommended adding another year to the nursing course.
But CHEd chair Carlito Puno said the recommendation was unlikely to be
implemented soon.
“The CHEd sitting en banc will make the final decision,” Puno said, adding
that he was personally against an extra year’s study in nursing.
“My worry is that when nursing becomes a five-year course, enrollment will
plunge. The CHEd might be blamed for that,” he said.
Puno ordered the cancellation of scheduled public hearings on the issue,
saying it was giving the impression that the recommendation had already been
approved.
He said other stakeholders like school owners, parents and students should be
involved in the hearings.
Puno noted that prospective nursing freshmen had shifted to other courses
when they heard there was a possibility of another year being added to the
nursing course.
“Can you imagine the political repercussions if enrollment in nursing
plunges?” Puno said.
He said nursing graduates who had gone to work abroad were contributing
significantly to the economy through their remittances.
The addition of yet another year to the nursing course will add to the woes
of parents who are still reeling from the yearly tuition increases and the
rising cost of sending their children to school.
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