By Vincent Mariel P. Galang
Reporter
A GOOD retention program is a must to ensure employee loyalty not only in businesses, but also in hospitals, where keeping trained professionals has become a challenge because of low pay.
Dr. Arturo S. De La Peña, president and chief executive officer of St. Luke’s Medical Center, said in an interview on Feb. 18. that the major challenge in retaining medical professionals, especially nurses, is their smaller salary when compared with those overseas.
“‘Yung mga nurses natin [our nurses] and other medical technicians are being pirated by other countries, and the differentiating point is the amount of salary that they are receiving,” he said.
For instance, regular nurses in Singapore are able to receive P120,000 to P150,000 per month, while those in the Philippines, in the case of St. Luke’s, receive about P31,000 per month, he said.
In addition, the aging population of countries such as Japan and Germany has prompted them to recruit nurses in the Philippines. Japan last year announced the need for 48 registered nurses and 585 registered caregivers, while Germany early this year announced the hiring of 400 local nurses.
In turn, St. Luke’s has looked into its compensation programs while developing programs for the skills development of its nurses, Dr. De La Peña said.
“Our threat is number one, how to retain, and how to recruit new nurses, so we’re trying to improve the working condition of the nurses so we can improve retention. And we’re doing improvements in our training programs, so that we will be the preferred hospital to be applied by new nurses,” he said.
Starting last year, talent calibration and succession planning were implemented to help the nurses know where they can work best and in effect identify potential future leaders.
“Last year, we did a talent calibration so that we would know the specific skills of all of the people within the organization and see whether their skills fit to the job that they are doing because if there is no fit we can probably redirect them to a field where their skills will fit in,” he said.
“We developed also the succession planning. It is essential to do so, so that from the talent calibration, you are able to identify emerging potential key leaders. You need to do so, so that everybody will be motivated to work harder for the organization and from the talent calibration, you would know who are to be promoted and identify future leaders of the organization,” he added.
Recruiting an outsider is an option only when no one in the hospital is found to be a potential leader can.
“The success of every organization depends on a robust succession planning and it depends also in infusion of new talents, so from the talent calibration, from the present roster of employees you are not able to identify who would lead that particular section now we are going to recruit from the outside,” he noted.
The group is also looking into giving nurses the chance to learn another language depending on the need. It is also developing a curriculum that allows nurses to be trained in a specific field. In effect, these programs will be able to help nurses increase their value if they opt to go overseas in the future.
“One program that we are offering our nurses — we put a retention timeframe for them. Once they get employed they have to stay with us for about three years,” he said, adding that the hospital is considering giving them an option to learn a second language.
He said nursing today has become a specialized field, thus the hospital is developing a competency-based curriculum that is geared towards specialized nursing. For instance, some nurses are being trained specifically for the operating room in addition to their basic skills. Some are being trained for critical care, for the elderly, for cancer patients and for those undergoing dialysis.
“What we are doing is, as they work with us, we are preparing programs, so that they could also be certified on these sub-specialties, so that when they go to other countries their value becomes higher,” he said.
