Nurses swamp DoLE for rural jobs

MANILA, Philippines—Only a day after it announced that it was recruiting nurses for rural health work, the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) was swamped by more than 15,000 applicants, a labor official said Tuesday.

DoLE spokesperson Nicon Fameronag said that as of 1:42 p.m. Tuesday, 15,858 online applicants had registered for the 10,000 slots of the RN Heals employment program.

“This (figure) is just for one day and a half. It does not even include the walk-in applicants in our regional offices,” Fameronag said.

This was not surprising as news about the DoLE’s employment program had been disseminated widely by the news media, he said.

There are an estimated 100,000 unemployed nurses in the country.

RN Heals

Fameronag said the 10,000 nurses being recruited through RN Heals will be deployed to the poorest localities around the country.

Unlike a similar nurse employment program in 2010 that hired nurses for only six months, RN Heals will employ nurses for one year.

“They will get an allowance of P8,000 monthly and an additional P2,000 from the local government unit where they are assigned,” Fameronag said.

They will also have Philhealth medical insurance coverage and group insurance from the Government Service Insurance System.

DoLE will recruit and select the nurses while the Department of Health and the Department of Social Welfare and Development will decide where they would be deployed, he said.

Applicants should be physically and mentally fit, licensed by the Professional Regulation Commission, and preferably be residents of the area where he or she would be deployed.

The government will begin deploying the nurses chosen for the program by Feb. 11, Fameronag said.

However, the Partido ng Manggagawa (PM) labor group said the RN Heals program needed some reforms. It also asked the DoLE to inspect hospitals “for violations of labor standards, including the charging of so-called on-the-job-training fees on registered nurses.”

‘Cheap labor’

“RN Heals leaves much to be desired because it fosters cheap white-collar labor among less than 10 percent of the estimated number of unemployed registered nurses,” said PM chair Renato Magtubo.

He said paying nurses P8,000 for work in rural areas was “well below the Salary Grade 15 stipulated by law for entry-level public sector nurses.”

“Hazard pay, night differential and other allowances are also mandated for public sector nurses but DoLE is silent whether RN Heals provides for such mandatory benefits,” Magtubo said.

“In Tunisia, a popular uprising was sparked by the desperate suicide of a 26-year old unemployed university graduate. That same hopelessness haunts the lives of more than 100,000 registered nurses who are unemployed and some 20,000 to 40,000 more that will be added when the next batch of nurses graduates in April,” he said. –Philip Tubeza, Philippine Daily Inquirer