MANILA, Philippines – Singapore is looking to recruit more health professionals and allied health workers, with a special “welcome” for Filipino nurses, Singaporean ambassador to the Philippines Constance See said on Thursday, July 18.
“We have announced that we will be needing a lot more healthcare and allied healthcare workers, including nursing aides, and so there has been a push to recruit more of them,” See said in the opening program of the Philippines-Singapore Friendship Week celebration at the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) on Thursday.
See said that Singapore welcomed nurses from around the world, but “especially [from] the Philippines,” citing Filipinos’ English language proficiency and their “natural way” of caring for patients, which made them the “preferred choice.”
She added that many Filipino nurses served as frontline staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are very grateful for that, and over the past couple of years or so, the government has announced new schemes to continually improve their working conditions and their pay, and hopefully make it even more attractive to come to Singapore.”
See said there was no particular number of health workers the city-state was looking to recruit at this time.
Healthcare is one of various rising industries in Singapore – others being information and communications technology, precision engineering, finance, and social services.
As of latest government numbers, there are around 200,000 Filipinos in Singapore, 84% of whom are overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). Among the OFWs, around 60% are skilled and semi-skilled, while the remaining 40% are domestic workers.
DMW Secretary Hans Cacdac said that Filipino workers with “better and stronger” skill sets have been deployed to Singapore in recent years.
“For domestic workers, the growing trend is protection [by] enhancing their skills in training,” he said.
The Philippines supplies many of the world’s health workforce, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippine government set a cap on deployment of health workers abroad to preserve the workforce in local hospitals.
This move by the Rodrigo Duterte administration was criticized, especially since health workers dealt with lack of protections and delayed benefits, billions worth of which were not released until 2024.
The Philippines continues to deploy health workers despite workforce shortage. In May 2024, Health Secretary Ted Herbosa disclosed a shortage of 190,000 healthcare workers in the Philippines, according to a Inquirer.net report. – Rappler.com