Who wants to be nurse nowadays?

Awaiting Jocjoc Bolante’s deportation to Manila, siblings claim he’s innocent of the P728-million fertilizer scam. They may fool themselves all they want, but Jocjoc’s flight to America shows guilt. History has a way of settling scores. Only by having brother Jocjoc tell the truth can they hope to revive the family honor.

Eliseo dela Paz’s refusal to face Senate probers of his mysterious P6.9-million Moscow baon also exhibits guilt. Here is another comptroller who, like Gen. Carlos Garcia, is about to stain the family name with unexplained, therefore dishonest, wealth. Is it worth it, more so if he’s just taking the rap for a superior?

Bolante and dela Paz’s cases are akin in an odd way. On one hand admin Sen. Miriam Santiago is raring to arrest dela Paz to make him explain his misappropriation of public money. On the other, another admin Sen. Ed Angara is reluctant to arrest Bolante who has yet to explain his 2004 plunder of farm subsidies. The difference is that one’s confession can hurt the President, while the other won’t affect her at all except in leadership by bad example. Which is why the Philippines is being compared to Uganda: there the dictator was Idi Amin, here the chief’s motto is Dia Amin.

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The Philippine Nurses Association held a national confab last week during one of the worst times for the profession. Poor employment, poor earnings, and poor education plague them. And they’re getting no help.

RP has more than a quarter-million new nurses. Only a handful have work. Ever since a zoom in nursing school enrolment eight years ago, there has been no commensurate rise in job openings. Hospitals have decreased; so have doctors’ clinics, as medics retooled as nurses. The American dream that fed the nursing boom suddenly soured. Upon graduation from a four-year B.S. Nursing course, jobseekers found the US Immigration window closed. In 2001-2003 nurses were so in demand that US employers paid to have visas issued to entire families. Today they’re still hot, but processing is in “retrogression”. The 50,000-a-year quota of work visas to Filipinos filled up so fast up to several years ahead that the US simply stopped accepting any more applications till the backlog eases. Then too, other lands aped the Philippine cash-in on the global nursing shortage. As aging populations of Europe, the Middle East and Australia sought new nurses for care homes, other Asians elbowed out Filipinos with cut-rate offers. China and India may have suffered from US retrogression too, but it only meant joining Filipino nurses in the long unemployment queue.

Supply and demand kicked in. As nurses begged for jobs, hospitals found an income break. New nurses are now being charged P3,000-P5,000 each to be taken in as apprentice in need of an all-important “certificate of work experience.” Ironically the jobless pay to be given jobs. All they get, though, are trainee diplomas that hardly qualify them for coveted postings abroad. State hospitals worsen the trouble, PNA head Dr. Leah Samaco-Paquiz laments. Six years since enactment of the Nursing Act, the pay of government nurses has yet to rise to the mandated P16,093 a month. Most still get less than P10,000, which makes one wonder when politicos will ever stop taking and start giving. Millions of Filipinos in the countryside are in dire need of basic care that nurses can give as front-line experts, Samaco-Paquiz points out. Officials would do well to “hire” nurses as “volunteers”, even for just transport and food stipends. That can ease the nursing unemployment and at the same time the health-care gap. But the attention of congressmen, governors and mayors is elsewhere, on pork barrels.

The beast feeds on itself. Families scrimp to send the brainiest sibling to nursing school so the grad can lift up the rest. But colleges have sprouted of late not to train but to trade — charging steep tuitions for four long years to students who hardly learn a thing. And after graduation day they charge some more for review class for the licensure exam. Close to 40,000 nursing grads take the board every June and December. Only 40 percent, or 16,000, pass. They add to the ranks of the unemployed, along with flunkouts.

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Reader Romy Francisco of Tacloban City, believing in peer pressure to keep our public officials on the straight and narrow, suggests:

“Most politicians are members of the Jaycees or Rotary. If they stick to the tenets, motto and scope of their organization, we can be progressive and graft-free. On the Presidency, most previous ones came from Congress and so were well versed in lawmaking, but not in good governance. I hope (Quezon City Mayor) Sonny Belmonte considers running for President. Not just an ex-legislator, he is a seasoned (local) executive. He can duplicate for RP what he did in QC.

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