Staying power

Sometimes the most meaningful and difficult thing a person can do is the simplest. When faced with more lucrative employment possibilities in other countries, the best of Filipino graduates from the medical field should have many easy offers coming their way. But then they choose an amazing yet intuitively correct thing: They choose to stay.

This is the example being set by two cum laude graduates of the University of the Philippines Manila, two persons who share two other things aside from a distinguished alma mater. They topped their respective board exams and they want to work at the state-run Philippine General Hospital rather than seek better-paying chances abroad.

Jomel Lapides is ranked No. 1 among the 78,135 examinees who took the nursing board exams conducted by the Professional Regulation Commission. Though nursing is no longer the surefire avenue to employment it was in past decades, landing atop the entire pile surely offers Lapides fantastic additions to his curriculum vitae for possible foreign jobs. But a day after finding out just how well he did, Lapides had already made up his mind: he is staying put.

“My family and friends are here,” Lapides, the son of a construction worker from Rodriguez, Rizal, said. Even as he worked as a tutor in math and science, Lapides said that his priority after formally gaining his license would be to work at the overcrowded PGH in Manila. Too many patients, not enough doctors and nurses. He had done his on-the-job training there and he saw that the hospital catered to mostly impoverished patients who would not be able to afford private hospitals. “These are the people who really need help,” he remembered thinking to himself. “[My classmates and I] were exposed to public hospitals and different communities,” Lapides said. “Though there are many hospitals, poor patients from the provinces still have to go to PGH (to afford the treatment).”

Lapides also had a lot to say about the current sorry state of the nursing profession where too many schools already churn out too many graduates with no realistic employment to look forward to, creating a surplus of nursing graduates estimated to be over 200,000. This is where government should get involved, he says.

It is Lapides’ belief that government should send nurses to the far-flung provinces of the Philippines to provide the most basic medical care instead of leaving them stranded in the ranks of the unemployed. They could do so much good elsewhere. “Why not send us to serve there?” he asked. “There are so many of us.”

This same unvarnished brand of conviction is shared by Mark Augustine Onglao, who emerged No. 1 out of the 2,131 examinees who took the medical board exams. Like Lapides, he too is staying right where he is. He also intends to apply for work at the PGH instead of trying his luck at more financially promising opportunities in other countries. To Onglao, being blessed with such a test result leads him to take on a mission on his own, something he believes other medical graduates should also pursue.

“It is not just about money but the people and their lives,” Onglao said of the prospect of choosing to toil at the PGH. “For me, it is more gratifying to treat our fellow Filipinos than go abroad and serve other nationalities. It feels good to practice medicine here where we are needed.”

Both Lapides and Onglao seem to be aberrations when one considers just how difficult it is to make a proper living working for a government institution while staying on the straight and narrow. They both have the potentials to make much more money working for a large, private medical institution or for a hospital in the United States or the United Kingdom.

We are taught to consider those Filipinos who work abroad as heroes, yet there is nobility in deciding to stay where they are most needed, a quiet courage to stand up for what – and where – they believe in.

Perhaps this is an idea whose time has arrived.

And now, that beautiful idea might just be contagious. Onglao revealed that others from his batch of aspiring physicians shared this idea of staying in the Philippines where they were most needed instead of going abroad. “Perhaps we have become aware of the brain drain and the lack of doctors and facilities in the country,” he said. “We all want to help change this.”

Sometimes, the right place to be is exactly where you already are.