Too many caregivers?
Institute for Labor Studies

Issue Date: July - September 2004

They migrate in droves. Armed with some training in care-giving skills and their knack to look after the elderly, they ply the globe to attend to the aging, the weak, and the sick of foreign lands. With a 4,000 per cent increase of Filipino caregivers from 2001-2003, this new lot of migrant workers might slowly redefine the image of overseas Filipino workers.

But is this really the image of the new OFW? Or is it the face of the latest addition to our surplus labor?

To care or not to care. The capacity of Filipinos to look after the sick can never be underestimated. In fact, this is the primary trait that makes other countries prefer Filipinos over other foreign caregivers. Filipinos are perceived to be humane, patient, and adaptable. Our workers’ relatively good facility with the English language is also an edge.

However, some countries are now requiring more from caregivers. For instance, Canada, as one of the “most publicized destinations,” requires the applying caregivers to have completed a course of study equivalent to Canadian secondary education or at least second year college in the Philippines. A six to twelve month training in patient care is also necessary.

Because of these requirements, training centers mushroomed all throughout the country.

In 2003, 782 caregiver-training centers nationwide were registered and accredited by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). Their course modules, often designed specifically for Canada, generally focus on basic first aid, life support, nutrition, and patient care. English as a second language is also taught as well as courses in personality development.

These training centers produce graduates by the thousands. How many of these graduates can actually land jobs as caregivers abroad? How many of them are forced to stay home and take whatever job that comes their way, or worse, stay unemployed?

An army without a battlefield? With the boom of the demand for caregivers, Filipinos—always ready to cash in on the latest craze—jumped at the opportunity to help bring in additional income to their oftentimes cash-strapped families. According to the TESDA, there were 54,644 graduates of caregiver training centers nationwide from 2002-2003. The National Capital Region, having the most number of training centers (249), produced 35,663 or 65.3 per cent of the total graduates in the country.

Region IV-A (CALABARZON) followed with 4,454 graduates from 106 training centers. On the third notch is Region III, which produced 4,150 graduates from their 93 training institutions.

These caregivers troop to countries that have a high demand for their services, like Taiwan, which ranked first as a country of destination as it attracted 78 percent of the total caregivers sent abroad or close to 15,000 persons. It is followed by Canada which registered 1,811 and Israel at 1,787, both accounting for more than 9 percent each of total deployment figures.

However, our supply of caregivers far exceeds the demand, which brings us to ask if we realistically studied the market first, or if we, as we are sometimes wont to do, plunged overzealously into it without doing some reality check.

NCR graduates alone are more than enough to fill up the demand requirement for caregivers. The country would still have labor surplus even if deployment figures from last year would be doubled. The problem is even compounded by the proliferation of bogus or unaccredited training centers that produce thousands of incompetent graduates per year. This situation will merely add hordes  to our ballooning unemployment statistics. 

While it is generally acknowledged that the demand for caregivers would increase in the near future (with Spain, Saudi Arabia, and the United States as prospective countries of destination), projections still indicate that despite this, we will not be able to deploy our multitudes of caregivers.

No power. The role of the TESDA is to accredit, register, certify, ensure quality training by setting standards, and to continuously evaluate training institutions. To protect the public from bogus training centers, and to somehow regulate the number of graduates per year, TESDA implemented a moratorium on schools that are offering caregiving courses. TESDA also sets the number of students that each training center should accommodate.

Despite these, however, there are still reported cases of violation. Unaccredited schools sprout everywhere while accredited ones take in more students than their prescribed quotas.

In Davao, for example, DOLE regional officials admitted that it is hard to monitor the schools that might have violated the moratorium. Rossana Urdaneta, TESDA Davao City-Davao del Sur director, said that TESDA does not have the power to run after schools that offer caregiving courses without the agency’s authorization. All they can do is to monitor and evaluate accredited training centers. Schools that are found to have violated the moratorium are punished with non-renewal of their permits.

Realizing its limitations, TESDA has enlisted the help of local government units (LGU) to address the problem. Legally, the LGU has the power to close down unaccredited schools.

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