Filipino Nursing Herald

Here's great news for Filipino nurses, caregivers and midwives in the UK: the British government has reversed its policy of denying work extensions to non-EU health workers and even raised salaries from €12,500 British pounds (P1.156 million) to €14,600 (P1.351 million) annually. Across the UK, health workers, called carers, working in nursing homes had faced deportation after the UK began denying work extensions to those who come from non-EU countries. This ensued because of a policy, drawn up earlier, that favors workers from EU-member states.

Headhunters from Canada have reportedly started luring Filipino nurses away from Ireland, where the government refuses to give citizenship status to Filipino immigrants, even to those who have stayed there for over seven years. In the past few weeks, Canadian recruiters have gone on a massive recruitment drive to get as many as 250 Filipino nurses to move to Alberta, where green cards and better wages await them. There are about 10,000 Filipino nurses in Ireland and only a few have been granted citizenship. The Irish government does not recognize educational credentials of the spouses of Filipino nurses and Filipinos pay higher school fees for their children because, without citizenship, they're classified as international students.

Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius (Photo from Wikipedia ) The African Press Agency reports that Mauritius --an island nation off the coast of Africa in the southwest Indian Ocean, about 900 kilometers east of Madagascar--may open its doors to foreign nurses. The island state has been losing nurses to France, which has its own nursing shortage of about 25,000 positions. Mauritians are fluent in French and English is taught in schools, that's why they're being recruited to France.

Earlier this year, the Norwegian government said it was contemplating the recruitment of foreign-educated nurses to fill its own nursing shortage, which is expected to reach as large as 100,000 positions in the next few decades. The plan, however, is being blocked by the Norwegian Nurses Association. Since this story came out in the Norway Post, I haven't seen any other update anywhere on the Internet. If you find any additional news on this, please let us know, so we can share it to everyone.

I've gotten good feedback aboout nursing in France, but to be able to qualify for a nursing license, you'd have to speak fluent French first. I had two semesters of French back in college in UP (my first course was Journalism in Diliman), but I can't speak one complete sentence in French anymore. Actually, I had two semesters of French (10 and 11) and two semesters of Spanish (1 and 2), but the only words I remember are Lo siento and Désolé and I can't even tell which is French and which is Spanish! I'll post more about nursing in France later.

ABS-CBN's Bandila reports that work opportunities for nurses are currently available in Canada, Spain, Australia at New Zealand. We've earlier blogged about opportunities in New Zealand and Australia, but it's also good news to hear about new opportunities for Filipino workers in Canada and Spain. Canada is busy preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics, that's why they're inviting seasonal workers to help build the infrastructure needed for the Games. Aside from construction workers (heavy equipment operators, welders, painters, etc.), they're also looking for cooks, hotel workers, truck drivers and even people who'd work restaurants and fast food chains. Around 600 nurses are needed in the city of Saskatchewan in Canada. You can get more information on beautiful Saskatchewan here . Aside from caregivers, nurses and engineers are also being invited to apply for jobs in Spain, the Philippines' former colonial master. To qualify for a job in Spain, applican...

Time is running out for five Bulgarin nurses and a Palestinian doctor who was sentenced to death by Libyan authorities for deliberately infecting up to 400 children with AIDS. The medical workers have been in custody since 1999, after being sentenced to death row in 2004 and in an appeal in 2006. EU officials led by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also the German foreign minister is leading an international appeal to free the medical workers. Will Libyan authorities give in to the appeal? Being a nurse myself, it's pretty hard to imagine infecting as many as 400 children with a blood-borne disease like AIDS, unless all of them received the same AIDS-tinged blood. Perhaps if you use the same scalpel on as many mothers in-labor without disinfecting it after every use, then there might be a chance you could infect 100 perhaps? But 400? Unlike a staphylococcal infection, AIDS isn't easily transmitted through infected objects we pass around. That's why it can only be transmitted throug...