With the worldwide economic slowdown, many of the estimated 100,000 unemployed nurses in the country are finding it harder to get work abroad, with the processing of application papers to the United States now possibly taking up to three or four years, current and former officials of the Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) have said.

Former PNA national president Marilyn D. Yap said the global crisis was affecting the job prospects of nurses overseas, thus, the Department of Labor and Employment’s NARS (Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas) program was a big help to the nurses.

Yap said, however, that if only the government had the funds to maintain a 1 is to 5 or 1:10 nurse to patient ratio in local hospitals, all the unemployed nurses might find work.

“The doors to jobs in foreign lands were open before. What has happened because of the economic meltdown, the recession in the US, is a slowdown in the processing of papers,” Yap said in a recent interview.

“For the US, it now takes them (nurses) three to four years [to leave] unlike before when they could leave easily every year,” she said.

PNA national president Teresita I. Barcelo said the NARS program was a great help to the nurses even it could only take in 10,000 of them.

“That’s already good. We have an estimated 100,000 unemployed so if you give 10,000 short emergency employment, that’s okay,” Barcelo said.

She said the program, which would train and deploy nurses to the rural areas starting April, was meant to give nurses “additional competence” but not to train them for work abroad.

The labor department is accepting applicants for the NARS program, which would give the nurses an P8,000 monthly allowance during their training.

But it’s not all bleak news. Beginning this month, the government will deploy the first batch of nurses and caregivers to Japan to kick off the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA).

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) is targeting 600 caregivers and 400 nurses for deployment to Japan in the next two years, Malacañang said on Saturday. With TJ Burgonio