Bleak job prospects for Pinoy nursing, MD graduates

Ateneo de Manila University researchers warn that young Filipinos graduating with a degree in nursing or medicine face an uphill battle for stable employment, fair pay, and meaningful roles in the local public health system.

This comes as the Philippines faces a massive shortage of health professionals, with less than eight doctors per 10,000 people—below the international standard of 10 per 10,000—and over 127,000 vacancies for nurses, particularly in rural areas and private facilities.

The researchers found that many new graduates feel lost and unsupported when they join the workforce.

“I finished my MD from one of the best schools in the country,” said a municipal health officer assigned to a remote area. “But when I worked here, it was an entirely different ballgame. We weren’t trained how to deal with the local administration and procurement, how to talk to local chief executives. I wasn’t prepared nor trained for this—but this is how we make things happen.”

According to many of the researchers’ interviewees, the country’s medical and nursing education system is too focused on hospital-based care, leaving them ill prepared to handle community work, government systems, and health programs.

Further, many health facilities point to restrictive hiring rules and budget ceilings as barriers filling vacant posts. For example, local government units (LGUs) are required to allocate no more than 45% of their annual budget to salaries. This forces overworked nurses to take on multiple roles, often without additional pay.

“The 45% cap on personnel services really prevents us from hiring,” said a provincial health official. “You see a ward nurse being assigned as the public health nurse… and also as a records officer. That’s extra work, no extra compensation.”

As a result, fresh graduates are forced into a frustrating dilemma: many are willing to serve in the public sector, but are either not qualified under strict civil service requirements, or are offered short-term contracts with no job security or clear path for career growth. Meanwhile, private facilities struggle to match government pay scales, and both sectors lose workers to better-paying jobs abroad.

“The nurses we lost are our best nurses,” said one hospital administrator. “It is painful that the trained ones are the ones who leave. The ones left with us are either the new ones or the very old.”

Training, too, is a problem: medical facilities across the country and their staff need to meet new standards aligned with the Universal Health Care (UHC) Law, but some clinics say they are forced to pay out of pocket for training fees and accreditation requirements—sometimes spending over ₱50,000, while getting back only ₱2,000 from government reimbursements.

So is it still worth pursuing a career in healthcare?

The researchers believe the answer is yes—but only if key reforms are made, including scholarships with return service agreements; better integration of community health in school curricula; less restrictive hiring policies; and stronger support for newly-deployed health workers.

These problems and proposed solutions were laid out in the recent peer-reviewed paper, “Health Workforce Issues and Recommended Practices in the Implementation of Universal Health Coverage in the Philippines,” conducted by Veincent Christian F. Pepito, Arianna Maever Loreche, Ruth Shane Legaspi, Ryan Camado Guinaran, Theo Prudencio Juhani Z. Capeding, Madeline Mae A. Ong, and Manuel M. Dayrit of the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health and the University of the Philippines-Manila. The full study is available at https://archium.ateneo.edu/asmph-pubs/314.

For interview requests and other inquiries, please email media.research@ateneo.edu. Visit archium.ateneo.edu for more information about our latest research and innovations.