Concerned by what it called rapidly declining standards in nursing education, the Philippine government this month ordered 23 institutions that offered nursing courses to close them down by the end of the academic year.
The unusual move was a response to the plummeting scores of students taking the national nursing examination. Only half of those who take the test pass, compared with a pass rate of 70 percent to 80 percent just a few years ago.
Education officials blame the low success rate on the hundreds of new nursing programs, most of dubious quality, that have proliferated in recent years to take advantage of shortages of nurses in other countries, including the United States.
“The nursing market here has grown by leaps and bounds,” said Fely Marilyn Lorenzo, who leads the nursing-education panel at the Commission on Higher Education, the government regulatory group that made the decision. “But the growth has not been in the expected university setting, where students get a strong humanities background. Computer institutes are running nursing programs, and that’s what we have been fighting.”
The commission began a review of nursing programs this year, when 200 institutions applied for new permits to teach nursing. The numbers set off alarm bells. Officials suspected that quality was suffering. As the world’s largest exporter of nurses, the Philippines is eager to protect its reputation for producing well-trained, highly skilled graduates.
In a survey of 174 nursing institutions, the Commission on Higher Education rated 103 as “poor.”
All of the nursing programs were given until September to raise their standards. The 23 institutions that lost their permits were those that failed to turn their programs around. The commission also said it would not accept applications to start new nursing programs until next year. About 2,300 students at the affected institutions will have to find new programs in order to continue their nursing studies.
Countries such as the United States, Britain, and Saudi Arabia, with chronic nursing shortages and aging populations, actively recruit nurses from the Philippines. Monthly salaries in the United States range from $3,000 to $4,000, compared with about $125 in the Philippines.
In many Filipino hospitals just one nurse tends 60 patients. Working conditions are grim, and the hours are long. For many nurses and would-be nurses the choice to emigrate is an easy one.
As a result, there has been a rush to enroll in nursing courses. This year, it is estimated, some 4,000 doctors will enter nursing schools because nursing is an easier path to emigration than trying to meet medical-licensing requirements in the United States.
The rush to leave, however, has resulted in an acute shortage of nurses in the Philippines itself. Some rural hospitals have no doctors and no nurses; only midwives keep the doors open. Many more nurses leave than are trained each year.
Critics of the brain drain are calling it a national crisis.
Yet because overseas workers will send home an estimated $8-billion this year, the government, which is burdened with debt, encourages their migration.
Ms. Lorenzo believes that weeding out the poorly run schools will ultimately benefit nursing professionals and their patients. “In other programs, if you turn out low-quality graduates, then you just don’t get good performers,” she said. “But in public health, if you turn out bad graduates, you can kill.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 51, Issue 13, Page A43