EDITORIAL - Noynoy should look into the plight of nurses

Reacting to complaints that many hospitals charge fees on nurses seeking work in order to acquire the needed experience to apply for overseas jobs, the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines issued this challenge: Name names.

Normally, this would have been a fair enough demand. If you have a particular beef, there should you direct your particular fork. But these are not your normal times, as the nature of the complaints themselves suggest. Where on earth could you find workers paying to do work?

Besides, the phenomenon is sweeping. We are not talking here of a few isolated incidents. This is happening everywhere, in the length and breadth of the archipelago. Everybody is talking about it.

For the PHAP, therefore, to demand complainants to name names is a big disappointment. It suggests that the PHAP has not heard about it. If that is truly the case, then the PHAP must be living in an entirely different universe.

 But nobody believes the PHAP knows nothing about this “onli in d’ Pilipins” phenomenon. In fact, there is a perfectly appropriate Cebuano slang to describe the reaction of the PHAP — “nagpagoryo-goryo lang.”

To challenge complainants to name names is a defense often used by politicians to skirt an issue. It is a defense rooted in the belief that to name names will scare away complainants or prove too much of a hassle as to discourage them from pursuing the matter any further.

And sure enough there is validity in that belief. Remember that most of the complainants are poor, forced to take on a very difficult and taxing profession because it affords them their only chance for a better life if they happen to land a job away from these shores.

Many of the complainants come from families that had to sell properties and possessions or go into debt just so they can send their children to nursing schools, only to find that when they graduate and pass the board exam, their job opportunities have virtually dried up.

So they either take local jobs that pay them peanuts, or pay up, just so they can work and gain the experience, in the hope that someday the tide overseas will turn. Yet, when they do so much as complain, they are dared brusquely to name names. Nurses do not deserve this. (FREEMAN)