After the Brexit vote, Whittington Hospital in Archway received a drop of applications coming from Europe. As a result, they sent headhunters to the Philippines. Now, the hospital has hired about 60 new people to work there. These Filipino nurses have already started shifts.
There is a whole community of Filipino nurses in London, and they even have their own Facebook page. Filipino nurses have the third highest number of NHS staff with 12,744 individuals, just behind India and Britain. They also provide the most number of qualified nursing, and health visiting staff.
While it’s not uncommon for people to move abroad, a significant number of the Philippine population does. Reasons for this stems from low minimum wage, fewer job opportunities, and fewer options in general in their home country.
A person who does this is called an Overseas Filipino Worker, or OFW. This is a way of life in the Philippines, as earning money is difficult there, families often invest in one member to send abroad. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there are about 2.2 million OFWs working abroad during the period of April to September 2016.
Out of all the places OFWs can choose to live and work, why is London so popular? For OFWs, coming to London means getting enough pay to support themselves, as well as their families. This can be helping families back home with normal day-to-day expenses, or sending family members through university. London is also a place that has a large Filipino community already; this makes the transition for OFWs a little easier.
The difficulty of making a good living in the Philippines causes many of the educated population to leave the country. Brain drain happens because the minimum wage is so low, at only 475 PHP (6.79 GBP) – 512 PHP (7.32 GBP) a day. For some people, it makes financial sense to leave.
Arah Fletchero Baloran, 34, is a local nurse at University College London Hospital Foundation Trust. She is one of the many Filipinos who left the country where they grew up in search of a better life. She was raised in a provincial part of the Philippines, where she dreamed of studying fashion and working in the creative industry.
Baloran now lives in Kings Cross and has been a local for the past 10 years. “My family is a family of doctors and nurses. So it’s a tradition in my family that if you’re the eldest, you need to follow that tradition,” she said.
Traditions still have a strong impact thing in the decision-making process for young people’s future in the Philippines, and parents are usually the one to make a choice.
Baloran chose nursing instead of becoming a doctor because she did not want to study all her life. After she graduated nursing school in the Philippines she passed the board exam and went straight to work as a registered nurse in a local private hospital in Isabella, Philippines.
Although this was a great start, it wasn’t sufficient to support her family. “ I came to realisation that being a nurse at home is not enough. I want to help my family with bills and other personal financial problems. So I applied for another job as a clinical instructor at a university,” she said.
“I already had two jobs but still, I was not financially compensated. If the nurses in the Philippines were highly compensated, I would stay there, but unfortunately not. I’d rather work abroad and leave my family to have a greener pasture.”
Moving to the UK is a very difficult adjustment for nurses in the Philippines. Before they can start, they need to be a qualified registered nurse with UK credentials. This happens through taking the Overseas Adaptation Course.
To work here, all nurses, including midwives and health visitors, need to register with the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Some Filipino nurses get their adaption training at London North West Healthcare NHS Trust.
In the end, many nurses say their hard work and being away from their family was all worth it. Baloran says: “I’ve been qualified for 10 years now and so far so good, all my hard work paid off. My family is living a life now; I’m traveling all over the world. Being a nurse here gave me a good quality of life that I have not experienced before. I bought a house for my parents and my own house and car as well.”
Although most Filipinos live in South London, more and more are coming to North London as jobs appear. There are three major hospitals in Islington including The Whittington Hospital, Islington Central Medical Centre, and St. Pancras Hospital that have job opportunities.
And while a large number of Filipino nurses are coming straight to London, other areas in the UK are also welcoming them, including Worthing, where the Western Sussex Hospital recently just hired 60 nurses.
In an article by Western Sussex Hospitals, Nursing director Maggie Davies said: “With more than 20,000 nurse vacancies nationwide, nurses can choose where they wish to work in many cases. It is therefore particularly heartening to see our overall nursing numbers in the trust grow year-on-year.”
While not all Filipinos in London are nurses, many of their children chose this path. Cora Cosmod, a second-generation Filipino says: “My parents are not nurses but I am now a qualified nurse.” Many Filipinos choose to study nursing which is considered as a respected career path because the world will always need nurses. Sixty-five percent of Filipinos are nurses and/or in the allied medical fields. It is a career that will ensure a family will have food on the table, and that is what is important to many Filipinos
According to an article by Positively Filipino, the number of Filipinos living in the UK has increased by more than 800 percent. There were about 18,000 in 1986 to about 250,000 in 2011. Seventy percent of those Filipinos live in the Greater London area. More and more Filipinos are being welcomed into our local community, whether as a nurse in Whittington Hospital or as the number 43 Bus driver. Islington has always been a city of diversity, and it will continue to be this way.
Image by Nicole Weber
Leave a Reply