Free Refresher Webinars for Philippine-Registered Nurses

By Michelle Chermaine Ramos
LJI Reporter
The Philippine Reporter

On August 25, 2022, the Philippine Consulate General in Vancouver hosted a free webinar for Philippine Registered Nurses as part of a refresher series for nurses who are working on getting their credentials recognized to practice in Canada.

Resource speaker, Dan Buenaventura, a staff nurse at the Health Sciences Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba delivered a lecture on the subject of “Health Assessment and Management of Patients in Long-term Care”. This is part of the Vancouver Philippine Consulate General’s joint efforts with the other Philippine posts in Canada to advance the credentials recognition of Filipino nurses in Canada to help alleviate the nationwide healthcare worker shortage. (See links to related stories in previous issues at the end of this article)

How did the Consulate come up with this initiative?

Economic Assistant Edwin Batallones: The project was an offshoot of the Nurses Convention organized by the Philippine Consulate General in Vancouver last March for Filipino nurse graduates in BC and the Consulate’s engagements with the Dean of the nursing school of the University of Santo Tomas, one of the oldest schools in Asia and a designated Philippine Center of Excellence in Nursing. During her visit to Vancouver to attend the Convention and meet with her counterpart schools of nursing in BC, she suggested the idea of a webinar refresher series as a way of helping Filipino nurses meet or bridge perceived gaps in the curriculum or practice of nursing. These are those internationally educated nurses whose curriculum have been found inadequate or not comparable to Canadian standards or who ended up working outside of their field due to either failed attempts to get licensed or their decision to work elsewhere to earn their living abroad. While the webinar series will not be counted towards a formal Canadian education, we hope that their attendance in the webinars will help keep them abreast of current issues, augment their learnings, or, at the very least, reignite in them the interest to pursue their nursing career in Canada.

Is this for Filipino nurses already in Canada or are there initiatives to assist Filipino nurses in the Philippines looking to move to Canada to address the healthcare worker shortage here?

EB: This webinar series is intended for Filipino nurses already in Canada, particularly those who have been unsuccessful in getting registered as nurses and who, for different reasons, have found themselves detached from their chosen profession and in need of immersing themselves with select nursing topics or issues. Each of the Philippine Consulates General in Canada (Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto), as well as the Philippine Embassy in Ottawa, are undertaking various initiatives to help Canada address their healthcare worker shortage, from facilitating the process for those who are already here to making it possible for additional nurses to come to Canada from the Philippines. However, our priority is in helping the former.

Is there a particular reason why the focus of the webinar was on long-term care patients?

EB: The topic is one of those identified by the nurse participants to our Nurses Convention, when they responded to a survey of subject matters they needed refreshing on or were most interested about. The list of potential topics was then offered to our resource persons for the webinar series to choose from, based on their competence and/or knowledge.

What is the consulate doing to advance the credentials recognition of Filipino healthcare workers in Vancouver?

EB: One of the first things we did was to engage the necessary stakeholders, such as the National Nursing Assessment Service, the BC Nurses Union, and the BC College of Nurses and Midwives. We also raise the issue of credentials recognition with the local government officials (MLAs, MPs, city officials, Ministers) we meet, at every opportunity. We organized meetings between the NNAS and the Philippine Commission on Higher Education and Technical Nurses Panel to discuss the framework of Philippine education in general and the nursing curriculum in particular. We met with our nurses and physicians in separate townhall meetings, and it was in one such meeting that the idea to host the Nurses Convention came about. We invited the deans of the PH Centers of Excellence in Nursing to come to Vancouver to meet with their counterparts to discuss comparability of our nursing curriculum and explore forms of collaboration between our schools. So far, it has only been the University of Santo Tomas that has visited. We brought her to meet the heads of the nursing schools of the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Thomson Rivers University, Douglas College, and the BC Institute of Technology. Our latest initiative is the Webinar Refresher Series but we’ve also been actively helping the BC government promote its recently announced support measures for IENs applying for registration in the province.

The work of the Philippine Consulate General in Vancouver on credentials recognition is part of a joint effort by all Philippine posts in Canada, under the leadership of the Philippine Embassy in Ottawa. While we undertake our own events in Vancouver, there are also many cross-cutting activities that we do as one body.