Filipino Medical Workers Research Articles

Experiences of Burnout among Staff Nurses of Private Hospitals in Surigao City

This descriptive quantitative study is primarily concerned with the level of burnout among nurses working in private hospitals in Surigao City. The following research tools were used in the actual collection of data which includes, the respondent’s Personal Data Sheet and an adapted survey questionnaire namely, the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OBI). These instruments shall be used to gather both respondents’ demographic profiles and determinants of the mental health impact of COVID-19. The respondents of this study were the staff nurses in four (4) private hospitals in Surigao City who are involved in rendering care to patients exposed to COVID-19. The snowball sampling method was utilized in determining the sample size in consideration of the researchers’ and respondents’ limited mobility in the said hospital due to the guidelines, new normal health protocols, and difficulty in identifying and meeting with the schedules of the respondents. Burnout has been described as a dangerous condition resulting from overwork and chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It can lead to physical or mental illness. To effectively play their role during this pandemic, it is essential for them to maintain psychological and mental health; however, the literature has shown that the emergence of COVID–19 has significantly impacted the psychological and mental well-being of our Filipino medical workers. Vast amounts of evidence have shown a significant association between the COVID–19 outbreak and adverse mental health issues such as stress or burnout, depression, insomnia, and anxiety. With the limited actions implemented in response to the studies on the health impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers, there is a need for immediate attention to formulating actions or interventions that will halt the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially on the mental health of healthcare workers.

The Substance of Care: Ethical Dilemmas in Migrant Medical Labour

ABSTRACTAs transnational mobilities for health in the Southeast Asian region intensify, this article investigates the everyday socialites that take shape in spaces of medical care. Told through the narratives of Filipino medical workers and caregivers in Singapore, this paper examines the socialities among migrants and locals who work together, and who care for patients in fast-paced public hospitals, as well as nursing homes on the margins of the city. It considers how care and control are simultaneously contested and reinforced through negotiations of authority, profession and hierarchies, as well as through the micro-political and affective interactions and intimacies of the workplace. These transcultural mobilities critically disrupt naturalised and normative assumptions about the region and its ‘values’, and about the locations and substance of care, while also provoking among migrants new ethical articulations and aspirations on the meanings of kinship, faith, home, and life itself.

Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia by Megha Amrith, Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2017, xiii + 226 pp.

<i>Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia</i> by Megha Amrith, Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2017, xiii + 226 pp.

Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers. Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

L’auteure de cet ouvrage, Megha Amrith, est une jeune anthropologue d’origine indienne qui a rejoint l’Institut universitaire des Nations unies sur la mondialisation, la culture et la mobilite (UNU-GCM) en 2014, a la suite de son doctorat obtenu a l’universite de Cambridge en 2012. Ce livre issu de sa these porte sur la migration des travailleurs medicaux philippins en Asie du Sud-Est aupres desquels elle a mene des enquetes ethnogra...

Review of: Megha Amrith (2016) Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Review of: Megha Amrith (2016) Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Today, the Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of medical workers in the world, with nursing in particular offering many the hope of a lucrative and stable career abroad. This timely volume narrates their stories in a multi-sited ethnography that follows aspiring migrants from Manila’s vibrant nursing schools to a different reality in Singapore’s multicultural hospitals and nursing homes, and back home to a Filipino village. In so doing, the book offers anthropological insights on the lives and expectations of Filipino medical workers who care for strangers in another Asian city and the everyday encounters, anxieties and boundaries they face. It locates their stories within wider debates on migration, labor, care, gender and citizenship, while contributing a new and distinctive perspective to the scholarship on labor migration in Asia.

Filipino Medical Workers in Asia: Narratives, Discourses, and Contestations

Filipino Medical Workers in Asia: Narratives, Discourses, and Contestations

Review of Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia, by Megha Amrith

Caring for Strangers (2017) takes the reader on an interesting journey to the everyday lives of Filipino migrant nurse workers placed in Singapore. It does so focusing on the narratives and the frequent encounters that anthropologist Megha Amrith had over her fieldwork time in Singapore. The result is a rich compilation of the social, political, and economic factors that make many men and women in the Philippines undertake nursing education with the purpose of migrating to work abroad. This review of the book focuses on three aspects of the book that the present author found to be of great importance in the contemporary anthropology of economy and labour: the political economy of global capital, the marketization of care work, and the ways in which these migrant workers built their subjectivities.

Amrith, Megha: Caring for Strangers. Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Amrith, Megha: Caring for Strangers. Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Megha Amrith, <i>Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia</i>

Caring for Strangers. Filipino medical Workers in Asia, written by Megha Amrith

Caring for Strangers. Filipino medical Workers in Asia, written by Megha Amrith

Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (Book Review)

Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (Book Review)

Encountering Asia

This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional cultural diversity and the everyday manifestations of regional political-economic power configurations and inequalities. The narratives show that beyond merely responding to state discourses on how migrants ought to represent the nation-state abroad, migrants attempt, on their own terms, to understand their place in Asia, and the world. Their journeys take place at a moment of social and demographic change as many Filipino medical workers travel across borders to care for aging populations in other Asian countries. The field of care raises complex moral dilemmas for Asians of different ethnic and national backgrounds, and this complicates any simple notion of Asian values. Moments of pan-Asian solidarity, in which friendships are cultivated across national boundaries, are often overridden by experiences of racial and cultural prejudice. Among diverse Asians in Singapore, divisive and hierarchical notions of first world and third world, modern and backward, caring and uncaring are prevalent in everyday judgments of others. Filipino migrants assert their global aspirations and their moral reflections on how to live and care for others; simultaneously they create distance from those who they believe do not share such aspirations and moral views. This article illuminates the transformations in migrant subjectivities as migrants experience and evaluate a range of cultural encounters as medical carers in the region.

‘They Think We are Just Caregivers’: The Ambivalence of Care in the Lives of Filipino Medical Workers in Singapore

Notions of care have multiple inflections in the lives of Filipino medical workers in Singapore. The present paper explores ethnographically how Filipino migrants narrate and experience ambivalent notions of care as they move across borders. Their labour is fraught with ambiguity as they distance themselves from ideas of care in their working lives. They position themselves as professionals and attempt to shed the long-standing associations of Filipinos as ‘unskilled’ care labour in the global economy and the feelings of shame ‘care’ evokes. However, discussions of care are at the heart of their narratives on the forms of sociality they have left behind in the Philippines and on their notions of how one ought to live in the world with others.