President Rodrigo Duterte has lifted the ban on deployment of Filipino healthcare workers abroad.
Speaking in behalf of the President, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello said that those who are into healthcare services are now clear to leave the country for overseas jobs.
“The president already approved the lifting of the temporary suspension of deployment of nurses and other medical workers,” Bello said.
Bello said that the decision of the President considered lifting the ban on overseas deployment of healthcare workers amid a slowdown in the contamination of the deadly virus from China.
According to the labor chief, the daily case numbers and death rates have dropped.
However, the President has placed a cap on the number of healthcare workers who would be allowed to leave every year. Bellow said that a maximum number of 5,000 medical professionals can leave the country every year.
“We are starting only with a cap of 5,000 so we will not run out (of medical workers), but this may increase eventually,” Bello said.
Last year, almost 17,000 nurses signed overseas work contracts data from the Commission on Higher Education and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration shows.
The government in April barred nurses, doctors and other medical workers from leaving, saying they were needed to fight the coronavirus crisis at home.
Thousands of health workers, who call themselves “priso-nurses”, had appealed to the government to let them take jobs abroad, Reuters reported in September. The nurses say they feel underpaid, under-appreciated and unprotected in the Philippines.
While the lifting of the travel ban was a “welcome development,” Maristela Abenojar, President of Filipino Nurses United, challenged the government to make true its commitment to give its nurses better pay and benefits if it wants them to stay.
Filipino health workers are on the front lines of the pandemic at hospitals in the United States, Europe and the Middle East as well as at home.
New coronavirus cases in the Philippines have remained below 2,000 since Nov. 10, while deaths, which totaled 8,025 as of Nov. 20 only equal 1.93% of the country’s 415,067 cases.
Hospital bed occupancy has also eased from critical levels, and the government has been gradually easing quarantine restrictions to jumpstart the coronavirus-hit economy.