DoH: We must find ways to keep our health workers

Acknowledging the exodus of healthcare professionals, the Department of Health (DoH) on Wednesday pressed the need to “find ways to retain” Filipino health workers in the country.

In an interview with reporters on the sidelines of the Conference on Philippine-Pacific Sustainable Health Workforce for Health Security in Makati, DoH Secretary Teodoro Herbosa said there should be programs that would make Filipino healthcare professionals choose to stay in their own country.

“We need to train our health workers to be good enough to be exported, but we must also find ways to retain them and make them stay,” Herbosa told reporters.

Earlier, Herbosa said the Philippines’ healthcare system needs 190,000 healthcare workers to plug existing gaps.

To address this, the Health secretary said the hiring of medical practitioners will continue and scholarships for those wanting to have a medical career will be provided.

He said that having “many medical schools locally” is one of the country’s advantages.

“We have over 80 medical schools in the Philippines, 22 are state universities and colleges. So there are things that we can share,” he added.

“We license 10,000 nurses but we have 13,000 nurses that leave every year. So that’s not sustainable; we have to find ways,” he said.

In his speech, Herbosa underscored that “there is no more critical topic for the region than addressing the health workforce crisis in the Western Pacific.”

He noted that the Philippines’ problems are the same as the problems of the Pacific Islands when it comes to the healthcare sector.

“As Pacific neighbors we encounter similar challenges in health — the triple burden of communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases and health impacts from climate change. And, yes, the critical shortage of health workers which we keenly felt during the Covid-19 pandemic where we had many Filipino health worker deaths here and in other countries,” Herbosa said.

The DoH chief advocated for robust health systems and a sufficient healthcare workforce, urging fellow health officials in the region to “act together.”

“Like a canoe that relies on skilled hands and a collective effort to sail through both calm seas and storms, so too must our health systems be guided by the steady hands of our health workforce,” he said.

“This importance of human resources for health is something that we in the Philippines have come to recognize not only from a theoretical standpoint but also as a result of our decades of actual experience managing health worker migration and balancing it with the need to ensure the presence of a robust domestic health workforce,” he said.

To address roadblocks in the country’s healthcare system, Herbosa said the DoH has intensified its efforts to strengthen the Philippines’ health workforce by prioritizing workforce development, supporting domestic policy reforms, and engaging in bilateral agreements to confront migration-related challenges.

“We have also taken a proactive role in advocating for sustainable and equitable health workforce solutions on the global stage,” he added.

“Through a diplomatic initiative which we launched earlier this year in a Side Event at the World Health Assembly, we are advancing and sharing our belief that a well-supported, fairly distributed, and resilient health workforce is essential to achieving universal health care and safeguarding health security — not just for our nation but for the entire region and the world,” Herbosa said.

While recognizing that dealing with health workforce issues “will not come with one-size fits all approaches,” Herbosa vowed to forge a mutual reliance and collaboration with the Pacific Island neighbors through the sharing of best practices, exploring innovative and collaborative strategies to strengthen health workforce capacity, exchanging knowledge and technical expertise on human capital development and systems strengthening, and promoting decent work for health workers across the countries.

“The Philippines stands ready to work with our Pacific Island neighbors, the World Health Organization, and key stakeholders to realize the vision of a resilient, equitable, and sustainable health workforce,” Herbosa said.

“Let us seize this opportunity to strengthen our collective resolve and work together to ensure a sustainable and empowered health workforce that can respond to the challenges ahead,” he added.