Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas (NARS) program

Last Tuesday, in class, we discussed about remittance and migration. Since I am in the health team, I am writing about migrant nurse. The Philippines is one of the major suppliers of nurses to the international market, thousands of nurses emigrating every year. Since nursing seems an easy ticket to higher wage overseas jobs, many go to nursing courses. Now, unemployment of newly graduated nurses is growing concern in the country. According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer(by Jerome Aning, 02/15/2009), more than 100,000 licensed nurses are unemployed, and most of these nurses cannot go abroad because they lack the two-year experience required by foreign hospitals. To address this issue and improve the health of rural areas, the government created the Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas (NARS) program in 2009, which hire unemployed nurses to work for rural clinics. However, it is criticized because the primary health care will not be the skills foreign hospitals looking for.