There are 36,410 Bachelor of Science in Nursing graduates from the Philippines who spent P405 million just to take the US licensure examination for the first time in 2023.

Quezon City Rep. Marvin Rillo, vice chairperson of the House committee on higher and technical education, revealed this on Monday as he sees nurse shortage in the country as the cause of the stall in provincial hospital upgrading.

Rillo pressed Congress to take strong action to retain Filipino nurses in the local health sector, which he said is already reeling from a shortage of practitioners in part due to overseas migration.

“We must increase the base pay of our public nurses who are now being ‘pirated’ aggressively by hospitals in America and other countries,” Rillo said.

Rillo has been batting for the passage of his bill that seeks to increase by 75 percent the starting base pay of public nurses, in a bid to dissuade some of them from seeking greener pastures abroad.

We would urge provincial, city, and municipal governments as well as private corporate foundations to encourage students to take up nursing by offering full scholarships.

Under Rillo’s House Bill No. 5276, the starting pay of nurses employed by the government would be bumped up to P63,997 per month from the current rate of P36,619.

Senator Sonny Angara has also filed Senate Bill 638, which seeks to raise the entry-level pay of public nurses to P51,357 per month.

Local governments are unable to upgrade hospitals due to a lack of nursing staff.

“We have received reports that many local governments in the provinces are unable to upgrade their hospitals simply because they lack nursing service staff,” Rillo said.

Additional nurses are a requirement for hospitals to advance to a higher level and increase their bed capacity based on Department of Health licensing standards.

“We would urge provincial, city, and municipal governments as well as private corporate foundations to encourage students to take up nursing by offering full scholarships,” he said.

Rillo cited the case of the Northern Samar provincial government, which recently passed an ordinance giving scholarships to nursing students to help address the (province’s) shortage of practitioners.

Meanwhile, data from the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing Inc. show that a total of 6,714 nurses educated in India also took the U.S. licensure examination for the first time in 2023, along with 3,299 graduates from South Korea; 2,712 from Kenya; and 2,400 from Nigeria.

The USNCSBN administers the NCLEX (or the National Council Licensure Examination) for registered nurses in America.

It costs US $200 (or P11,126) for a nursing graduate to register to take the NCLEX, a computerized adaptive examination taken by individual appointment in any of the 76 accredited international testing locations in 18 countries.

Here in the Philippines, there is only one NCLEX testing site in Makati City. This means that takers from the provinces must travel to the country’s financial hub to take the test.

Passing the NCLEX is the final step in America’s nurse licensure process, and the USNCSBN’s 2023 figures indicate that 52.6 percent of Philippine-educated nurses pass the test on their first take, whereas 42.3 percent of repeaters make the grade.

Nurses in America received a median annual pay of $81,220 in 2022, up from $77,600 in 2021, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The US bureau projects an average of 203,200 job openings for nurses in America each year, on average, until 2031.

Many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace nurses who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire. 

“The 36,410 is a record high and nearly double when compared to the 18,617 Philippine-educated nurses that took the US licensure test for the first time (excluding repeaters) in 2022,” Rillo said.