BPO offers new job for nurses

MANILA, Philippines - As the number of jobless Filipino nurses rise, the government has suggested alternative jobs in the business process outsourcing (BPO) and insurance businesses.

In an interview with reporters, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Assistant Secretary Felicitas A. Reyes said American insurance giant Aetna Insurance has put up a BPO firm that employs seasoned nurses.

Reyes explained the company is not an ordinary BPO operation because the nurses will be approving insurance claims. In the United States, the nurses approve the insurance claims in hospitals.

The nurses will be given the data and the authority to approve. However, Reyes explained that the nurses cannot decline the claim since under US laws, only doctors are allowed to disapprove claims.

Aetna Insurance has an existing facility in the SM Mall of Asia (MOA). It now employs 250 nurses and is expected to expand this number to 1,000 in the coming years.

Aetna offers a broad range of traditional and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, and medical management capabilities and health care management services for Medicaid plans. Its customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates.

Earlier, the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) said hundreds of thousands of nurses remain jobless because of a saturated market and expressed hope that those who enroll in nursing this school year would do so for love of the profession.

“Since three years ago, there are some 287,000 nurses who are either unemployed or underemployed. There are so many nurses now who are working outside the health sector,” PNA president Dr. Teresita Barcelo said.

She said nursing students should not be in it for the money but to serve patients.

“We are not discouraging them from taking up nursing. We need nurses. But we just hope that their intention in going into nursing is not to go abroad but to take care of patients,” she said.

The past decade saw the mushrooming of nursing schools– many of them substandard – in the Philippines, owing to the demand for nurses in other countries. Even doctors joined the bandwagon and also took up nursing.

Barcelo noted that the industry eventually became saturated.

Many countries, on the other hand, had imposed stricter rules on hiring foreign nurses, leaving many Filipino nurses jobless.