The Time of the Year

(Estimated reading time: 3 minutes)

I was always one of those people who never believes in second chances. It was always all or nothing. Especially because nursing is one of the most in-demand occupations here in the Philippines. I thought that I would just be another pebble on the beach. All of this changed and I now believe that I can have my own voice. I can be more.

Being a nurse in the Philippines was different from being one in the UK, USA, or in the Middle East. Nursing there was more appreciated as I would like to call it.

Filipinos is one of the leading providers of nurses and midwives in the whole world. In California, Filipino immigrants comprises about 6 percent of the state’s population, 20% of all registered nurses were Filipinos. They were the lucky ones, I once thought.

At the hospital I worked in, the equipment was not as sophisticated as those in the countries I mentioned before. The salary was also not that high. Here, we would earn around Php 8,000 to Php 13,500 at the entry-level and when you work in a private hospital, you could get paid at around Php 10,000 per month. To me, the salary was one of the reasons why other nurses go overseas because they could earn 6-digit salaries.

Despite this, we still gave it our best. Being a nurse makes the salary worthless if you can’t take care of your patient. The amount of pressure and the satisfaction of seeing your patients get better were both a nightmare and a dream come true at the same time. We had lives on our hands and a careless move can lead to devastating consequences.

But as the days went by, when nothing ever seemed to change, a question circled around my head. “Is this it?” I did not under-appreciate our line of work. However what I thought about was that nurses didn’t have the same high status as professors or policemen. It’s just that we work day and night, sometimes not sleeping at all, just to make sure our patients get the care they need. Nurses must protect, care, and make sacrifices just as other high-end professions do. Meanwhile us nurses, don’t get that much recognition

I believed that all of this will stay the same until I heard that 2020 was the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. At first, I didn’t get why 2020 was declared as our year until I looked up unto it and found out that WHO was up to something big for us. As I had read, its aim was for countries to invest more in nurses and midwives with the goal to achieve universal health coverage in an affordable and high-quality manner and to give the likes of us with more recognition for our work and efforts.

All of that was something I had to thank Elizabeth Iro for, the chief nurse of WHO. “This year; it’s really not just about celebration or recognition of the work and the contributions that nurses and midwives to date make towards meeting their health targets and health for all. This is also an important time for getting our partners and governments to make part of their priorities investment in nurses and midwives globally to grow their numbers,” she stated in her message. Nurses were finally getting the right treatment for our line of duty,

Now, it’s going to be different. Maybe I can finally go through with my passion as a nurse in my own country. This is our time of the year and we finally have hope.