Filipinos step into breach as care homes run low on staff
MELBOURNE: Filipina are stepping into the breach all over t he world as care homes run low on staff.
Miko Coner Galeng has spent the last month and a half undergoing a crash course of quintessentially German skills and virtues: pünktlichkeit, the art of being on time; mülltrennung, the importance of recycling waste into different bins; and stosslüften, or “shock ventilation”, where you open a window and turn off the heating for five minutes to let fresh air into a room.
Two years ago, Galeng’s only direct contact with German culture was a sausage stall called Wursty Wursty in his hometown of Manila. Now the 29-year-old Filipino works and lives in a care home for elderly people in the heart of the Ruhr valley and can fluently express surprise at a mishap with a full-throated Ach du liebe Zeit! (“Dear me!”).
Originally he had set his sights on Britain or Canada. The fact he ended up in Germany’s former rust belt, where Filipino care workers are rare, is a sign of a new scramble for non-academic but skilled workers from outside the EU, in which German companies have offered generous incentives to try to tempt new staff.
If Galeng had chosen to work in the UK, he said, he would have had to pay about 500,000 Philippine pesos (£7,600) upfront. The agency that hired him to travel to Germany, by contrast, paid for his flight, language teaching and a course that is designed to supplement his training as a nurse with the skills required of a carer for older people.
In Manila, Galeng would be earning the equivalent of €200 to €500 (£170 to £430 a month). At Belia Wattenscheid, a care home for 60 residents, where hires start out as an assistant before moving up to qualified carer after retraining, he and his Filipino colleague Christian Hiquana, 27, can each hope to earn between €2,500 and €3,000 a month.
For Michael Burmester, one of Belia’s directors, the new hires from overseas are still an experiment. “For now, we still hire German carers when we can – we are not yet reliant on care workers from outside the EU. We will need them tomorrow, however.”
The German government believes recruiting carers like Galeng is already indispensable: a new immigration act that comes into force this week is designed to lower the hurdles for third-country hires – those from places such as the Philippines, Mexico, Kosovo or Ukraine – especially in the health sector.
The challenge faced by Europe’s largest economy is stark. Every fourth person in Germany is aged over 60, and by the year 2050 it will be every third person. A report by the German Economic Institute (IW) in Cologne said the country would need an extra 76,000 geriatric nurses by the year 2025.
In Bochum, home to approximately 370,000 people, the demographic challenge is felt more acutely than elsewhere in Germany: 1,200 more people died than were born in the city in 2019, a negative trend that has been continuing since the 1970s. In 2018, 104,000 people in the city were aged 60 or over.
One of the floors at the Belia care home is named Zeche Holland, after a local mine. Broad-brush paintings of collieries adorn the corridors, an unintentional reminder that hard toil in the region’s dominant industry took its toll on the local workforce’s health and sent many into early retirement.
At the reception desk, a secretary spends several minutes scrolling down a waiting list of would-be residents. “We could have filled this place in a month,” she said.
Klaus Wilhelm, a 90-year-old widower and former telecommunications engineer, said he had signed preliminary contracts with four other care homes for fear of missing out on a room and a bed. “I feel very lucky to have found this place, it’s like winning the lottery,” he said.
But in order to give people like Wilhelm the attention they need, Germany has to fight some of its deep-seated instincts. In a country that prides itself on its dual apprenticeship system, becoming a geriatric nurse traditionally involves a formalised training programme of three years, combining 2,100 hours of theoretical classroom instructions and 2,500 hours of practice in a hospital or nursing home.
Recognising the value of other countries’ training schemes has historically been a challenge for German bureaucracy. Galeng and Hiquana are due to begin a six-month course that is meant to adjust their training to the skills required in Germany, but in the past the number of schools offering such courses has been limited, and the standards expected in different parts of the country vary.
Germany’s federal political system, which lends each of the country’s 16 states a high degree of autonomy on legal and public welfare matters, can act as a barrier against fast-tracking the kind of care workers the country will soon need. For example, some states accept paperwork with degrees and qualifications that has been translated by a translator certified by a foreign country’s German embassy, while others insist such documents must be rendered into German by a translator certified in Germany, which can be costly enough to put off applicants.
Then there is the German language, crucial for any care worker who might have to relay his patient’s problems to a doctor, but full of finicky grammatical genders and cases, which Galeng describes as eine grosse Herausforderung – a big challenge. Where he went to school, English was taught from an early age.
If the German government cannot find ways to lower the hurdles, it might find itself in a position where the demand for qualified care workers outstrips the number of people finding their way through the bureaucratic thicket.
Even before the law comes into effect this week, a German agency set up last autumn to help recruit staff from abroad has received 1,200 requests from care homes around the country.
