With the worldwide economic slowdown, many of the estimated 100,000 unemployed nurses in the country are finding it harder to get work abroad, with the processing of application papers to the United States now possibly taking up to three or four years, current and former officials of the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) have said.
Former PNA national president Marilyn D. Yap said the global crisis was affecting the job prospects of nurses overseas, thus, the Department of Labor and Employment’s NARS (Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas) program was a big help to the nurses.
Yap said, however, that if only the government had the funds to maintain a 1 is to 5 or 1:10 nurse to patient ratio in local hospitals, all the unemployed nurses might find work.
“The doors to jobs in foreign lands were open before. What has happened because of the economic meltdown, the recession in the US, is a slowdown in the processing of papers,” Yap said in a recent interview.
“For the US, it now takes them (nurses) three to four years [to leave] unlike before when they could leave easily every year,” she said. [source]
Filed under: Philippine News | Tagged: Filipino nurses, Immigration, nurses, Nursing, united states immigration, work opportunity
