The Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines, Inc (PHAPi) said the government should lower the deployment cap of health workers abroad, emphasizing around 40 to 50 percent of nurses in their accredited hospitals have left.

"I think we should restrict that (cap). Maybe the 5,000 a year before will be enough. If you will note, last year, only 11,000 nurses passed and then this May. Around 6,000 plus out of the 9,000 who took the exam," Jose De Grano, PHAPi President said during the "Laging Handa" public briefing on Thursday.

"Our estimate of the nurses that left us is around 40-50 percent of the previous number of nurses that we have. So, more or less we lost more than half of our nurses," he said.

In a virtual press briefing, Philippine Overseas Employment Administrator Bernard Olalia said they are not considering lifting the cap, which was first implemented in November 2020.

"We have no plans yet (to lift the cap) since the state of emergency is still imposed," said Olalia.

Olalia said the 7,500 healthware deployment cap is ''still far'' from being breached.

De Grano assured that private hospitals are prepared in case of a possible surge of COVID-19 cases as long as they have enough nurses.

"In the private hospitals, we are always ready for the COVID-19 cases. We did not close our COVID-19 areas. The beds are still there. We are prepared to admit these patients. The only problem is if we are going to have many cases and then we will not have enough healthcare workers, especially the nurses. We can have a limitation on that if there are not enough nurses, then that’s the only problem that we foresee," he said.

"We are always prepared. But then, of course, As I said up to a certain point, maybe if we no longer have enough nurses, that’s the only time that we will have to refuse to accept patients and we have to tell them that the hospital is already at full capacity," he explained.

However, De Grano noted that if COVID-19 cases increase and they will not have enough nurses, they will shift healthcare workers from non-COVID-19 areas to help COVID-19 facilities. Robina Asido/DMS