If you are one of those nurses in the Philippines who are planning to seek a nursing job in Australia, this is somewhat a bad news. You need to wait for at least two years before your application to be approved.

Australian Ambassador to the Philippines Rod Smith recently visited Cebu City and explained why such thing is happening. He stated that this is all due to a consolidation movement of Australia’s public healthcare sector. “From now until 2013 there will be no significant demand for nurses outside of Australia,” he said. He also stated that at present, there are at least 250,000 Filipinos working and living in their country and majority of them are working as nurses and other professions of the medical field.

However, the Ambassador didn’t mention in his statement if the current employment of the Filipino nurses in Australia would be affected. Moreover, he stressed out that that the employment demand for accountants, engineers, IT (Information Technology) experts in Australia will continue to grow over the next few years.

This decrease in the demand of nurses was also noted by Philippine Nursing Association president Leah Samaco-Paquiz. She particularly cited countries like USA and Australia. She also mentioned that majority of the nurses in the country are underemployed and unemployed because of these changes of policies and visa retrogression of destination countries.

The Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) is now encouraging the nurses to apply to other countries aside from the USA and Australia like Saudi Arabia (KSA). The latter is still in need 10,000 nurses for their public hospitals and are specifically eyeing Filipino nurses to fill the vacancies.

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