Hospitals stop on-the-job training for fresh nurses

THE major public and private hospitals have stopped providing on-the-job training to registered nurses following a disagreement over their internship fees, the Philippine Hospital Association said Sunday.

Group president Ruben Torres says its members have agreed to suspend all structured medical training given to nurses all over the country until they have met with the Philippine Nursing Association to settle the training fees that the nurses have to pay.

“[The Philippine Nursing Association] have put us in a bad light, “as if [the] host hospitals are greedy in collecting such fees,” Torres said.

“So until this is settled, the PHA has agreed to stop accepting nurses opting to get training.”

Flores says the hospitals will still honor the contracts to finish the training of the current batch of interning nurses, but they will stop accepting trainees until they can talk with the nurses’ association, and with luck within this week.

Nurses who have just passed the Nursing Licensure Examination claim the internship fees that the hospitals collect from them are “extortionate.”

Nursing graduates claim that they pay for their internship, while in the other professions like accountancy and engineering, the trainees are the ones being paid.

The hospitals charge interns P400 to P800 a month for a daily 8-hour duty that lasts three to six months.

Flores says those fees are minimal because the hospitals need to structure a program, facilitate formal instruction, distribute case loads, case evaluations and regular examinations.

“The fee that the hospitals charge nurse-trainees is just to defray expenses,” Flores said.

“It’s unfair to say that hospitals make money out of it. [The nurses] are putting us in a bad light.”

Flores says the medical services in the hospitals will not be compromised even if they stop training new registered nurses.

He says the nurse-trainees are assigned to supervising nurses. They are exposed to real-life cases, and they gain knowledge that they may not get from formal classroom instructions and medical textbooks.

But the new nurses claim that they get to be in servitude while on training. They demand that the hospitals pay them and not the other way around. –Rey T. Salita, Manila Standard Today