Dr. Fely Marilyn Lorenzo, director of the University of the Philippines’ Institute of Health Policy and Development and chairwoman of the inter-agency Technical Committee on Nursing Education, said a number of Filipino "nursing-medics" were turned away by foreign hospitals for interfering with treatment procedures.
She added that in the past two years alone, two nursing-medics in a Texas hospital were sent back to the Philippines.
A few years ago, Lorenzo said they monitored the case of some Filipino nursing-medics who were terminated from their jobs in the United Kingdom and forced to return home.
"Cases like these are undocumented. We learned about it only from friends (who knew them). They are part of the hidden population. These are all situational and undocumented," she told a health forum.
Ruth Padilla, president of the Philippine Nurses Association, said many nursing-medics have become so used to their jobs as doctors, they tend to act like physicians even when they go abroad to work as nurses.
"They have been doctors for so long. Some of them are already consultants when they became nurses. Subconsciously, in their heart, they are still doctors so when they are in the hospital, instead of rendering nursing care, they did medical management," she said.
Incidents like these earned the ire of foreign physicians because Filipino nursing-medics were expected to work as nurses, not as doctors.
Padilla cited an incident in which a nursing-medic attended to an emergency case and performed an operation on the patient.
"He did some surgery which, according to the law or policy of the hospital, it’s not a job of a nurse. So even if the doctor (nursing-medic) has the purest (intention) to save the life of that patient in a emergency case, you are not supposed to do that because you are employed as a nurse," she said.
Padilla advised nursing-medics to adjust to the professional demands of being a nurse since they have chosen the profession.
She advised those taking up nursing as a second course to "take seriously whatever a nursing student is asked to do because you already chose to be a nurse. You entered the nursing profession because of the big opportunity to go abroad and earn dollars. But you cannot just be a nurse, you have to be a good nurse."
Since 2003, around 3,000 Filipino doctors have taken up nursing courses and gone abroad to work in foreign hospitals where nurses are highly in demand. Around 4,000 physicians are currently enrolled in nursing schools.
Some fear the country’s health care system is in peril because the doctors going abroad are generally the most skilled and experienced ones.