Millennials and Empty Hospitals: A Vignette

 

My wife and I had just dropped my aunty at a hospital hostel where she is staying and where a good number of floors are closed because of a lack of staff. The same is true for several other hospitals and healthcare facilities where I’m from. The puzzling thing is, over ten years ago, when the vast majority of us millennials were still in college, a good number of our generation majored in nursing and other medical programs. In our own college alma mater alone, nursing block sections would reach well past Z and into the double letters, going all the way to blocks AA, AB, etc. Fast forward to the present decade, and the high number of enrollees nursing programs enjoyed in the late 2000s and early 2010s should have translated into adequately staffed hospitals or even a surplus of licensed medical staff. But this is far from the case.

Harbison and Myers stated that “a country which is unable to develop the skills and knowledge of its people and to utilize them effectively will be unable to develop anything else.” The key conjunction in this statement is the and between the two conditions: developing the skills and knowledge of people and utilizing these effectively. While there's little to no question that we were able to properly develop the skills and knowledge of Filipino nurses in their schooling years, our country’s failure lies in the second condition: the utilization. As the labor force quickly grew saturated with nurses and nursing graduates, policies were simply not in place to take advantage of this surplus and incentivize these graduates to stay in our country or even in the healthcare industry (example: increasing salaries, improving working conditions, government investment in healthcare, etc.). Thus, many of these millennial nurses took the path of their predecessors (our parents' generation) and moved abroad or left healthcare entirely. As a result, our healthcare system failed to develop, ultimately proving ill-equipped when we needed it the most (the pandemic). In the process, many of our citizens (senior citizens, patients with chronic illnesses, etc.) suffered as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dr. Resil B. Mojares: National Artist for Literature 2018

Image
Somewhat ashamed to admit this in writing, but the first time I met Dr. Resil Mojares, I didn’t know who he was, let alone his stature in the local community of letters—a community which, as a naive nineteen-year-old attending his first writers workshop, I was unwittingly about to be inducted into. This was back in 2010, at the 26th Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop, where I was first introduced to other luminaries of Visayan literature, as well as other young literary practitioners better read and with already more poems and stories to their name. Though a linguistics and literature major, I was still just a couple of years past a high school education that had weaned me on Homer, Shakespeare, Harper Lee, and other esteemed works of the Western canon, so I was a long way off from even beginning the process of what many a literary website refer to as “decolonizing one’s reading list.” Flashback to a couple of months from this writing, when I received that first emai...
Read more

Contextualizing the Cebu Art Book Fair in the Era of Globalization

Image
This article was originally published in the Cebu Almanac 2019–2023: Pandemic Crisis and Recovery, launched by the University of San Carlos Publishing House on April 29, 2024. An Apparent Scarcity   A little over a month after Supertyphoon Odette cleaved through the Visayas and parts of Mindanao, Cebu-born poet Lawrence Ypil posted on his Facebook timeline a link to an online literary folio that received a respectable amount of attention. Titled Odette in the Dark, the folio was envisioned as a “space” where Cebuanos could share their experiences of that night of the storm, and the long days, weeks, and months that followed. In his January 21 post, Ypil (2022) wrote, “We wanted to know how people fared in the storm’s aftermath. What they did in the dark in the light of candles. How many hours it took to get fuel, how many days it took before they drank iced water.”   Odette in the Dark was an admirable endeavor because its namesake storm was a collective experience tha...
Read more

[Fiction] The Parable of the Sower and the Executive

Image
This work of fiction was originally anthologized in Hulagway: Empire & Emporia, published and launched jointly by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Ateneo de Zamboanga – Mindanao Institute on March 9, 2024, with printed copies subsequently distributed the following month. * * * 1 There is this story that is a favorite among priests, preachers, and gurus of these islands. It tells of a young man who ventures into the desert alone. 2 His reasons are not given, but the solo journey into a desolate place signals to the listeners that this is a man intent on discovering something about himself that can only be unearthed after a long and arduous trek. 3 As he walks across the barren landscape, the young man encounters an older man tossing seeds into the dry earth. 4 His curiosity is aroused, and his longing for a conversation after several days on his own compels him to approach the old man and ask him what exactly he is up to.   5 “I am planting seeds,”...
Read more