Before the Alberta Health Services was restructured in 2008, the province launched an international hunt for qualified nurses after receiving $530,000 from the federal government. Officials said they expedited the immigration of some 28 such nurses from U.K.

Immigrants with nursing background are being enticed to become licensed practical nurses (LPNs) instead of registered nurses (RNs) through a pilot project initiated in Calgary’s Bow Valley and Norquest College in Edmonton, both located in Alberta. Free tuition is offered to get into the program, which focuses on language skills and clinical practice.

Senior nursing students in Edmonton had rallied against Alberta’s tactic of hiring more licensed practical nurses (LPNs) to save money. Using more LPNs than degree-holder registered nurses (RNs) would impact quality patient care, said the students.

Practical nurses in Alberta are only recently being made to take a two-year curriculum including hospital training. Before 1999, practical nurses were not regulated to perform physical assessment, medication administration including narcotics, infusion therapy and subcutaneous injections.

Sarah Buyocan, 32, spent P200,000 to finish her nursing degree in a northern Philippine college. She didn’t pass the licensure exam in 2001 so she worked in Hong Kong as helper, and then in Canada as caregiver. At the prodding from Bow Valley, she availed of distance learning to earn a diploma as an LPN. “I feel frustrated because I know I deserve a degree but this is the closest I could get into being a nurse again,” she said in a recent interview.

Evelyn Calugay, 63, a veteran nurse and chairperson of Pinay, a progressive group of Filipino women in Quebec, condemns this “upgrading” program.

“The objective of this bridge program is to maintain the systematic exploitation of foreign-trained nurses. Turned to cheap labor, the program definitely boils down to a profit-driven scheme… This is one impact of the LCP.”

“When foreign-trained nurses work in Canada as live-in caregivers, they lose their skills as nurses after approximately 4-5 years. A policy of the provincial regulating body requires a nurse to go back to nursing school for retraining after more than three years of being inactive. To encourage them to undergo training under an LPN program is cheaper for the government to subsidize. It also results in lower salaries for nurses who have almost the same or even better skills than a degree-holding Canadian-trained nurse,” Calugay said.

Plunder of Labor Power

Nurse-importing countries early this year balked at the Philippines for overproducing nursing graduates annually. Almost 100,000 board passers between November 2008 and June 2009 joined the more than 400,000 unemployed and underemployed nurses. Yet, even doctors had long joined this migration wagon. More than 9,000 doctors-turned-nurses left the country between 2002 and 2005, according to the Health Alliance for Democracy (Head), a nongovernment health organization based in the Philippines.

“This export policy has been embedded in the country’s economic structure as a means of oppressing the nation and its people ever since the colonization era. Labor power is one natural resource of a country that can be plundered,” Calugay explained.

She warned that “foreign trained nurses wanting to work in Canada in the future will have a very limited opportunity to work as a nurse unless they go back to university to take a degree in nursing. But this opportunity is getting narrower because of increases in tuition fees in universities, which free the government from subsidizing education. This is globalization in action.”

It has been said that Filipino nurses, who have the longest record of migrating, may also have the longest history of abuse. But the conditions in which they are subjected to abuse are not of their own making. These resulted from the aggressive, profit-driven, exploitative policies of both their point of origin and destination countries, Calugay said.

 Save as PDF