Macrine's(RIP)
BS Nursing Graduation, Holy Name College, Oakland, CA 1979I
have always plan to write in my blogs about the Filipino-American
Nurses here in the US. The subject is closed to my heart and soul, since
my late spouse, Macrine Nieva Jambalos Katague was a Nurse- a
profession that she loved.
One of Macrine dreams when she was a
child in the Philippines was to be a nurse. Because of her parents wish
she did not pursue a nursing career in her college years. It was only in
the late 1970's when our kids were all in college and high school, she
decided to go back to nursing school. She earned her Bachelors Degree in
Nursing in 1979 here in the US specializing in public health (
visiting nurse) then to Quality Assurance Nursing a few years before she
retired. The site below is her community involvement not only as nurse
but as a US citizen with Filipino ancestry.
https://whyretireinthephilippines.blogspot.com/2021/03/remembering-macrine-j-katague-through.html
Nursing has been in the blood of the Jambalos Clan as well as the Katague clan. Two of Macrine younger sisters were Nurses here in the US( Philippine trained- both are now retired). Two of her first cousins on the Jambalos clan also served as nurses here in the US. On my side of the family, two of my nephews are currently nurses. One is in the US and the other in UK. I have two nieces that are also nurses. One is in the US and the other in Canada. Macrine has a niece who is a US trained /educated nurse. I have other distant relatives and Filipino-American friends who are or were nurses and physicians here in the US, The Middle East, Europe and Canada.
After the U.S. colonized the Philippines in the late 19th century,
the country has relied on Filipino health care workers to mend the
staffing gaps in America’s patchwork health care system, especially in
times of medical crisis. Since 1960, over 150,000 Filipino nurses have
migrated to the U.S. In 2019, one out of 20 registered nurses in the U.S. was trained in the Philippines. There are a few I know that are US educated and trained like Macrine and her niece.
“Without
Filipino nurses, the U.S. health care system would have been
paralyzed,” says Leo-Felix Jurado, a professor and department chair of
nursing at William Paterson University, tells TIME. “It would have been
almost impossible for the health care system to have safely existed.”
From AIDS to COVID-19, America’s Medical System has a long history of relying on Filipino Nurses to fight on the front lines.
Just recently you may have seen a grim statistic : 32% of U.S. registered nurses who died of COVID-19 by September 2020 were of Filipino descent,
even though they only make up 4% of nurses in the United States. Yet an
event like the pandemic is disproportionately likely to affect
Filipino-American families: Approximately a quarter of working Filipino-Americans are front line healthcare workers.
Filipino nurses have also faced exploitation and wage discrimination—a
long history that persists today. Jurado says fraudulent recruiting
agencies and even some American health care facilities have lured
Filipino nurses with false promises of opportunities or higher pay, and
later forcing them to work long hours in unsafe working conditions,
sometimes with threats of revoking their visas. In 2019, 200 Filipino nurses won a human trafficking lawsuit
in which they alleged that the owners of a group of New York nursing
homes were not paid the wages promised in their contracts and were
forced to work in unsafe conditions with inadequate staffing.
To this day, foreign-educated nurses are frequently
sent to hospitals where it is difficult to recruit American-born
nurses, including public hospitals in inner cities and health care
facilities in rural areas that are frequently understaffed and
under-resourced.
“These physicians and
nurses work in communities with workers that are the essential workers
who don’t have these white-collar protections. And they’re working in
hospitals that don’t have all the equipment,” says Eram Alam an
assistant professor in the history of medicine at Harvard University.
“All of these things are working together, and I think all of these
things are suggestive of who is considered to be disposable in the
United States.” For details read:
https://time.com/6051754/history-filipino-nurses-us/
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/filipino-nurses-america-medical-system/
I
salute all Filipino-American nurses/physicians in the US and in other
parts of the world for their service specially those who are front line
workers in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. May your tribe
increase!!
