Only two out of every 100 students taking up nursing in the Philippines are likely to get employed abroad, data from the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) showed on Monday. Records from the DOLE's Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed that despite the high global demand for nurses and the fact that the Philippines produces about 400,000 nursing graduates annually, only a limited number of Filipino nurses has found work overseas for the past seven years. From 2000 to 2007, only a total of 77,947 nurses found jobs in the United States and other countries, POEA records showed. The highest deployment – 13,822 – was recorded in 2001. POEA data showed that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hired the biggest number of Filipino nurses in 2007 with a total of 6,633, followed by the United Arab Emirates, 616 and Kuwait, 393. The United States and United Kingdom, the favorite destinations of many Filipino nurses, employed 186 and 38, respectively. Nurses in the US with a one-year experience have a median salary of $50,000, or around 2 million pesos. Labor Undersecretary Carmelita Pineda earlier revealed that the Philippines is witnessing an over abundance of nurses primarily due to the large number of young Filipinos seeking to take up nursing. “The number of nursing enrollees has ballooned from 30,000 in year 2000 to a high of 450,000 last year and yet we have a shortage of qualified nurses to work abroad,” Pineda said. In her study, “Producing the ‘World-Class' Nurse: The Philippine System of Nursing and Education Supply,” Kristel Acacio, a doctoral candidate of the Department of Sociology in the University of California, said nursing graduates who can't find a job abroad can go into three alternative fields: teaching, medical transcription, and call centers. __
