Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 29) — Only around 1,000 Filipino healthcare workers were deployed abroad amid the controversial order banning medical workers from working in other countries, the Department of Labor and Employment said Friday.
These are exempted healthcare workers, who completed all their requirements before March 8, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said. Bello noted that from January to April this year, the Philippines sent some 200,000 medical workers abroad.
“Around 99 percent ang nahinto. Less than 1 percent lang ang nakaalis,” he explained in an online briefing.
[Translation: Deployment was down by 99 percent. Only less than 1 percent of the medical staff was able to leave.]
The DOLE chief said that they will share its database on temporarily banned workers to the Department of Health, which needs to tap more health workers as additional manpower to aid in the country’s COVID-19 outbreak response.
The DOH has said it is eyeing to hire an additional 15,757 health personnel.
The department added that 2,536 had been hired, with 1,159 of them deployed in Metro Manila.
The overseas deployment ban, signed by the Labor secretary on April 2, covers physicians, nurses, medical technicians, and other medical staff.
The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration earlier said the reversal of the ban hinges on two conditions: When President Rodrigo Duterte lifts his declaration of a state of public health emergency, and when host countries reopen their borders to foreign workers.
Duterte is expected to certify as urgent the bill extending the validity of the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act. law until September 30, Senator Juan Miguel “Migz” Zubiri said on Friday.
The said law, which gives Duterte special powers to realign the 2020 budget for COVID-19 response, is set to expire on June 23.
