By Joseph Pimentel – After working as a traveling nurse for the past five years, Alino, a registered nurse at John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, said there were Filipino nurses in every hospital she was assigned in. From the Houston medical center in Texas, the University of Arizona in Arizona, Yale-New Haven Medical Center in Connecticut to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, Filipinos dominated the nursing staff.
“They were everywhere,” she said.
It’s no surprise that there are a lot of Filipinos who pursue a career in the medical field especially in nursing.
With the economic woes of the Philippines, lack of Americans pursuing a career in the nursing field, and the position’s high pay, it’s a simple case of supply and demand.
For the past several decades, US hospitals have recruited heavily in the Philippines to make up for a nursing shortage. Many US agencies set up recruitment fair every year. The US Department of Labor estimates that the country by 2012 needs one million nurses to care for the more than 60 million aging baby boomers population. The study found that RN’s are projected to generate about 587,000 new jobs over the 2006-2016, one of the largest numbers among all occupations.
An independent non-profit organization on credentials evaluation, the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS), found that the Philippines topped the number of Certification Program Certificates Issued for the past five years.
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