A group of Filipino nurses aspiring to land on jobs abroad have expressed their support to a proposal for the Inter-Agency Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) to reset the cut-off date for exemption from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration’s (POEA) temporary deployment ban for medical workers.
In an online forum organized by the United Filipino Global, many of the 200 nurses who participated in the event said they support the proposal of POEA Administrator Bernard P. Olalia to request the cut-off date be moved from March 8, 2020 to August 31, 2020 instead.
More feasible option
Olalia said the proposal is more likely to be approved by the IATF than the outright removal of the temporary deployment ban.
“Maybe they could request, through the intercession of the Secretary [of the Department of Labor and Employment] if [we] could change [the cut off] to Aug. 31, 2020. This means all the employment contract from Aug. 31, 2020, will be included in the exemptions,” Olalia said.
He noted the request for allowing more medical workers to be deployed abroad should be done “gradually” since President Duterte is against allowing their mass deployment due to concerns on the country’s health-care system amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pending request
Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III agreed with Olalia, saying the proposal on the cut-off date should be accompanied with the necessary data.
Bello earlier sent a letter to IATF requesting for the exemption of 600 to 900 medical workers, who were unable to meet the March 8 exemption.
“On my own personal assessment, we can afford to send them away, but when it comes to statistics, if we will be sending 50,000 nurses away, that might be dangerous…we might be forgetting the fact that we are under a health emergency situation,” Bello said.
The IATF has yet to act on the said request from DOLE.
Deployment cap
Bello said they are now trying to obtain the necessary data from the Department of Health, Professional Regulation Commission, and the Philippine Nurses Association on the actual demand and supply for nurses and other medical workers so they could defend to the IATF the exemption of more medical workers from the deployment ban.
“For example, we will extend it [cut off] to Aug. 31 and we will lose only about 2,000 to 3,000 or 4,000 up to 5,000 [nurses], maybe we could convince the IATF to consider it. But if it is beyond, it might be hard [to convince them],” Bello said.
Last April, POEA issued its Governing Board Resolution No. 9, series of 2020, which temporarily banned the deployment of 14 medical categories.
Among those covered by the ban are medical doctor/physician; nurses; microbiologist; medical technologists; clinical analysts; respiratory therapists; pharmacists; laboratory technician; radiologic technician; nursing assistant/aid; operator of medical equipment; supervisor of health services and personal care; repairman of medical-hospital equipment.