Decolonising the Frontlines: Filipino Healthcare Workers in the Fight Against Covid
In theory, a virus should see neither ethnicity nor race, with its devastating impact resounding indiscriminately and universally. However, the rampant spread of the Coronavirus and the global crisis onset in its wake has left one group in particular clambering for survival.
With an estimated 40,000 active frontliners in Britain’s National Health Service, Filipinos make up the third largest nationality in the NHS (following Britons and Indians). Similarly, in the US, around a third of all foreign-born nurses are Filipino, with as of 2019, over 150,000 Filipino nurses immigrating to the US since the 1960s.
The widespread presence of the Filipino diaspora in Western healthcare institutions is thus starkly evident; as a tragic result, the Filipino healthcare community – specifically, the community of Filipino healthcare workers outside of the Philippines itself– has suffered disproportionately under the consequences of Covid-19.
Despite only making up approximately 1.5% of active workers in the NHS, Filipinos have had the highest death rate of any ethnic group, with over 50 deaths reported as of October 2020 (though the figures are estimated to be much higher). In fact, more Filipino healthcare workers have died in the UK than in the Philippines, according to the Filipino Nurses Association UK.
This trend is echoed in the US, where three times as many Filipino nurses have died than in the Philippines. According to a report by National Nurses United, by September 2020, nearly a third of all nurses who had died of Covid-19 were Filipino, despite Filipino and Filipino-American nurses making up only 4% of the national nursing population.
So why have Filipino healthcare workers been so specifically victimized by the coronavirus? The ugly truth: racial biases and systematic discrimation against foreign-born migrant workers play a major role in the perpetuation of this issue.
However, the systematic assignation of Filipino healthcare workers to the frontlines of global health crises and inadequate support of these Filipino frontliners are by no means new phenomena: its origins can be directly linked to the heyday of American colonial efforts in the Philippines. Under the “Benevolent Assimilation” policy carried out in the Philippines by the US, the Americanization of the Filipino education system touched the Filipino nursing curriculum in particular, with the implementation of English as the language of education and the subsequent importation of Western medical practices.
This demonstrated devaluation of non-Western knowledge and forced implementation of Western (American) approaches has manifested in both historical and present-day hierarchies of knowledge and experience within healthcare institutions. For example, in the US, ‘Philippine-trained nurses were disproportionately in the ICUs, the emergency rooms, in long-term care facilities… compared to White, US-trained nurses,’ according to Jennifer Nazareno of Brown University’s Philippine Health Initiative for Research, Service and Training. Despite the lasting impact of Americanization on Philippine nursing curriculums, here it is evident that Western education and training remains seen as being deserving of higher merit, with the lives of American-trained workers being thus prioritized over those from Filipino educational backgrounds.
As a result, Filipino healthcare workers are unfairly devalued within the contexts of global health crises and are too often treated as expendable for the greater good. Take as an example, the assignment of wards to individual healthcare workers within the NHS, which has been reported by one Filipino nurse as being too often drawn up along racial lines: Migrant or BAME workers are assigned to more life-threatening wards (including Coronavirus facilities) while their white or non-migrant colleagues tend to work in less risky areas. In addition, concerns have surfaced amongst the global nursing community that Filipino healthcare workers in particular are under-supported and lowly prioritized within the NHS, with allegations surfacing that Filipino nurses often receive inadequate amounts of personal protective equipment (PPE) despite working in riskier wards, leading to their exponentiated risk of contracting Covid.
The unjust, yet institutionally unchallenged notion of the expendability of Filipino healthcare workers is so endemic that the government of the Philippines itself is actively complicit in the commodification of Filipino foreign workers throughout the Coronavirus crisis. The country’s International Affairs Bureau stated that the Philippines would lift the cap on its healthcare workers deployed to the UK and Germany, in exchange for Covid-19 vaccines. In essence, the Philippine government has made clear their willingness to trade healthcare workers as human exports, in a desperate move that has been duly slammed by nursing associations as exploitative and dehumanizing.
Colonial valuations of individual worth, based on race or ethnicity, are thus unfortunately manifested within the contemporary context of the pandemic, as countless Filipino lives worldwide have been tragically reduced to bargaining chips or sacrificial pawns; treated as collateral damage within the ultimate public health crisis.
The devaluation of Filipino individuals within the contemporary healthcare industry is a shameful relic of the historic subjugation of the Filipino people under colonialism, and the subsequent delegitimisation of their systems of knowledge and ways of being. The Filipino healthcare worker community has thus been grossly overlooked over the course of the pandemic, both in terms of their invaluable contributions to the fight against Covid-19 and the unparalleled plight that they’ve suffered at its hands. Filipino healthcare workers are absolutely indispensable to the effective functioning of healthcare systems and institutions, both within and beyond the Philippines. In choosing to ignore the losses they’ve suffered as a result of this pandemic, we ultimately choose to minimize the tenacity, strength, and fearless perseverance that they’ve displayed during it.
