Well I thought this would be a relatively simple thing … a lot of people want to know about the best schools for nursing in the Philippines … and the exams that nursing students have to pass are "big news" here, so finding the top ten or so schools should be easy, no?

Well, in the Philippines, many things aren’t all that easy.  Here’s a list of schools that seem to frequently be in the top ten … the numbers are the percentage of students taking the exam who pass the exam … but much of this data turns out to be 4 or 5 or more years old.  Even newspapers will frequently publish lists 5 years old as if they were current.  Caveat emptor.  So you have to take this all with a grain of salt and some personal updated investigation:

1 UP-Manila 100%
2 St. Paul College-Iloilo 99.57%
3 Silliman University – Dumaguete City 98.39
4 West Visayas State University 97.06%
5 University of Santo Tomas Manila 96.67%
6 Saint Louis University – Baguio City 95.05
7 Mindanao State University Marawi City 95.0%
8 St. Paul College-Dumaguete City 93.38
9 Pamantasan ng Lunsod ng Maynila 92.53%
10 SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY – Bayombong 91.02%
11 St. Paul College-Manila 90.81%
12 University of the East-Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Center 90.57%

It’s very hard to find the websites of some of these schools.  This Filipino site does the best that I have seen.

Costs: everyone seems to ask this question … again, seems as if most people ask the last question first.  All these schools are cheap compared with Western nursing schools … the question of their quality seems much more important to me.  I was recently quoted 16,000 PHP per trimester for a full-service nursing school right near my house in Bulacan … prices will vary downward and substantially upward from there.

Curriculum: It’s important to note that virtually all nursing schools are 4 year bachelor of science in nursing courses here in the Philippines.  In the US, many RN’s attend only a 2 years Registered Nurse (RN) course, so make sure you compare apples with apples.  The holder of a BSN in either the US or the Philippines knows more and gets paid more than an RN

Admissions: Many of the top schools are part of pre-school to graduate level college organizations.  Students from the ‘outside’ can not just jump in to a nursing degree program.  Many schools have very tight quotas and stiff entrance exams, so consider the level of the proposed student before deciding what school s/he will go to … they may not make it in.

Language: I find this a problem that is steadily growing worse.  More and more schools teach all but the last year or two in Tagalog or Bisayan …which is silly in two ways.  First, the texts and technical terms are almost always in English (or Latin) and if the student is going to get along well later in a US hospital, language skills are essential.  The number one complaint about Filipino nursing school grads in the US is that patients have trouble understanding them.  I wouldn’t rule out a school because of language, but it’s an important consideration.

Skill Sets: For those of you who have never been in hospital in the Philippines you might be surprised to see the differences in duties between Philippine nurses and their US counterparts.  Here nurses spend much of their shift waiting for professional duties like drawing blood, taking vitals, etc.  The patient is expected to have ‘watchers’ from his/her own family to do the tasks nurses or nurse’s aids do in the US.  Bed pans, sponge bath, changing linens, etc. Make sure your Filipino student is dedicated enough to the field to be able to ‘shift gears’ to meet US standards … it truly is two different worlds.

Let me know what else I can do to help you with school decisions … I never know what information I can find until I try.

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