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Abstract

During the past few decades, the nursing workforce has been in crisis in the United States and around the world. Many health care organizations in developed countries recruit nurses from other countries to maintain acceptable staffing levels. The Philippines is the centre of a large, mostly private nursing education sector and an important supplier of nurses worldwide, despite its weak domestic health system and uneven distribution of health workers. This situation suggests a dilemma faced by developing countries that train health professionals for overseas markets: how do government officials balance competing interests in overseas health professionals’ remittances and the need for well-qualified health professional workforces in domestic health systems? This study uses case studies of two recent controversies in nursing education and migration to examine how Philippine government officials represent nurses when nurse migration is the subject of debate. The study finds that Philippine government officials cast nurses as global rather than domestic providers of health care, implicating them in development more as sources of remittance income than for their potential contributions to the country’s health care system. This orientation is motivated not simply by the desire for remittance revenues, but also as a way to cope with overproduction and lack of domestic opportunities for nurses in the Philippines.