Filipino nurses are the quiet backbone of hospitals and home health systems around the globe, and for many Filipino families, including my own, the story of nursing is also the story of courage, sacrifice, and love. This blog reflects both a global journey and a deeply personal one: the worldwide rise of Filipino nurses, and the life of my late wife, Macrine Nieva Jambalos Katague, who found her vocation in nursing at forty and never stopped serving until her final working day.
From the Philippines to the World
For decades, the Philippines has been known as the world’s largest exporter of nurses, sending hundreds of thousands of trained professionals to care for patients in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. In 2021, out of roughly 620,000 licensed Filipino nurses, an estimated 316,000 were already working abroad about half of the country’s licensed nursing workforce.
In the United States, Filipino nurses now make up the largest group of foreign-trained nurses: they account for about one in twenty registered nurses nationwide and roughly a third of all foreign-born RNs. Filipino nurses also staff hospitals and clinics in countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and other Gulf states, where aging populations and chronic staff shortages have fueled an aggressive demand for their skills.
A Legacy Rooted in History
This global presence did not happen by accident; it is the product of history, policy, and economics. During the American colonial period, the United States helped establish Western-style nursing schools in the Philippines, training Filipino nurses in English and in U.S.-modeled hospital systems, which made them particularly attractive to American hospitals later on.
By the 1960s and 1970s, new U.S. immigration laws and the economic crisis in the Philippines encouraged large-scale migration of nurses seeking better pay and opportunitieses abroad. At one point, estimates suggested that up to 85 percent of the Philippines’ nurses were employed internationally, making nurse migration a central, if painful, pillar of the Philippine economy through remittances.
Macrine’s Second Career of Care
For my family, the story of Filipino nursing is written not just in statistics or policies; it is written in the life of my late spouse, Macrine Nieva Jambalos Katague. After devoting her early adult years to raising our four children, she made a bold decision at forty: to return to school and pursue nursing as a second career in the United States, at an age when many think of slowing down rather than starting over.
I still remember those nights when the children were asleep and the house finally grew quiet, and Macrine would spread her textbooks and notes across the dining table. She would check on the kids one last time, then sit under a yellow lamp, reviewing anatomy terms and nursing procedures, determination in her eyes despite the fatigue of a full day as a wife and mother. She would complained to me how she hated her chemistry classes.
When she finally began hospital work, the transition from student to staff nurse brought both pride and anxiety, but she met it with the same quiet resolve. On some mornings, she left for her shift before dawn, yet whenever she talked about her patients, there was warmth in her voice: she spoke of “my old man in room 314” or “the young woman after surgery” as if they were distant relatives entrusted to her care.
At Home in Home Health
Later, Macrine moved into home health as a visiting nurse, a role that suited her blend of clinical skill and natural empathy. I watched her prepare her bag with meticulous care before heading out: blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, forms, small teaching aids, everything in its place for a day spent driving from one patient’s home to another.
She sometimes came home with stories that revealed the emotional landscape of her work: the elderly patient who insisted on feeding her merienda before the assessment could begin, or the immigrant family relieved to hear medical instructions explained with patience and a familiar cultural sensitivity. In these living rooms and kitchens, she was more than a nurse; she was a reassuring presence, a bridge between medical jargon and everyday life, between fear and understanding. She was the multi-lingual home nurse-English, Spanish and Tagalog.
There were also the harder days, when she would sit quietly for a few minutes after returning home, the weight of bad news or a declining patient still on her shoulders. Yet even then, she took comfort in knowing that her visits brought dignity and comfort to people facing illness in the most intimate space of all, their own homes.
From Bedside to Quality Assurance
In the last chapter of her professional life, Macrine moved from direct patient care to a leadership role at the desk as head of Quality Assurance for a home health organization in Maryland. Some might think that leaving the bedside means leaving “real nursing,” but she saw it differently: by improving standards, documentation, and protocols, she could indirectly care for every patient under the agency’s umbrella.
I often saw her reviewing charts and policies with the same thoroughness she once applied to her textbooks at the dining table. She would explain how a small change in procedure or a clearer guideline could prevent errors, protect nurses, and ensure that each patient received safe, consistent, and compassionate care. In her mind, Quality Assurance was not about paperwork for its own sake; it was about honoring the trust that patients placed in their nurses and in the health-care system.
A Personal Tribute to a Global Profession
When people speak of “Filipino nurses” as a global force, they are talking about hundreds of thousands of lives like Macrine’s, lives shaped by duty, faith, and a willingness to work quietly in the background so others can heal. Behind every shift in a foreign hospital, every home visit in a new country, and every policy reviewed in an office, there are evenings of study, mornings of fatigue, and moments of quiet pride that rarely make the news.
For me, the global story of Filipino nurses will always be anchored in the memory of one woman: my wife of more than sixty‑three years, who raised four children, then put on a nurse’s uniform at forty and spent the rest of her working life in service to others. In honoring Filipino nurses around the world, this blog is also a love letter to her and to all those like her, Filipino women and men whose dedication has healed not only patients, but families, communities, and generations across borders.
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