EDITORIAL — A continuing shortage

Filipinos know only too well that the country is suffering from an acute shortage of health professionals.

This has been validated anew by the chairperson of the Commission on Higher Education. CHED’s Shirley Agrupis said recently that as of 2025, the country had a shortage of up to 190,000 nurses. At current trends, she warned that this could hit 250,000 by 2030.

Latest data from the Professional Regulation Commission showed over one million registered nurses in the country, but only about 500,000 are estimated to be working in the Philippines, while over 300,000 are practicing their profession in other countries.

The exodus of nurses for better paying jobs abroad has been a problem in the country for decades. Because of low pay, there are nurses who have opted to work in call centers and other areas that offer higher compensation instead of practicing their profession.

This problem was highlighted during the COVID pandemic, when the lack of protective equipment, risk of contagion and infecting vulnerable loved ones forced many nurses and other health professionals to skip work in the days before vaccines became widely available.

Even when COVID vaccines were rolled out, with health frontliners given priority, the staffing shortage was still felt. A surge in global demand for nurses due to the pandemic saw many Philippine hospitals losing their staff to health facilities overseas.

Agrupis spoke during the ceremonial turnover to the CHED of the Philippine Nursing Education Roadmap 2030, which was based on research and nationwide consultations with 1,001 nursing students and institutional profiles from 77 nursing schools.

The government isn’t stopping nurses from seeking international opportunities for advancement, and is in fact working to provide quality nursing education and professional development. But Agrupis said the government is also moving to strengthen the country’s healthcare workforce.

CHED counts 434 nursing schools now in operation. Official records show that an average of 37,000 new registered nurses are produced annually. This is down from a high of nearly 64,000 many years ago, when global demand for nurses was such that even Filipino doctors were taking up nursing to be able to work quickly overseas.

The roadmap submitted to the CHED may address the nursing shortage, but only if it is properly implemented. All stakeholders must help make this so.