Nurse who gave world’s first Covid jab starts charity for Filipino nursing staff

A Filipino-British nurse, who is starting a new charity aimed at widening accessibility to the profession in her home country, has said the UK is currently wasting the potential of qualified nursing staff.

May Parsons said there were a surprisingly large number of Filipino-qualified nurses working as healthcare assistants (HCAs), something her new charity, the May Parsons Foundation, aims to address.

Ms Parsons, who is currently the associate chief nurse director for governance risk and compliance at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, caught the world’s attention at the end of 2020 by administering the first Covid-19 vaccination outside of a public trial.

“We're not utilising the people we have, and not maximising their potential”

- May Parsons

England in receiving the George Medal from the Queen on July 2022 and also represented the NHS at the Queen’s funeral procession in September 2021.

In addition, she has acted as regional director for the Filipino Nurses Association UK, which supports nurses from the Philippines working in the UK.

She was among the 75 nurses and midwives who have contributed in a significant way to the NHS and chosen by Nursing Times to represent the profession to mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS this July.

The May Parsons Foundation, her latest advocacy venture, aims to help unlock unused Filipino nursing talent in the UK, as well as helping out her home country’s nurse shortages.

The foundation, Ms Parsons explained, will have two parallel arms: one part in the UK, and another in the Philippines itself.

The UK side of the organisation is focused on Filipinos who qualified as nurses in their home country, but who are not currently working here as qualified nurses.

Ms Parsons said these Filipino-trained nurses were unable to qualify in the UK without starting from scratch, because access to a pathway to do so was missing in some trust areas.

Instead, she said they either worked in completely different industries or in a non-registered positions, such as healthcare support workers or HCAs.

This situation, Ms Parsons said, must be addressed: “There are those who are brought in, but who are the wives or husbands of nurses or someone else who have come here.

“There are a lot of cases where only the husband or the wife has got their visa, while the other has not qualified yet, and so the other comes as a dependent.

“They might be a qualified nurse in the Philippines, but not in the UK,” she noted.

She highlighted that, while a pathway to qualify in the UK from abroad exists for those recruited to come to the country as a nurse, this was not always the case for those who came as a dependent and in some areas people fell through the cracks.

“That’s what we’re looking at,” she said. "There are some who work as healthcare assistants or who work in completely different industries.

“They’re qualified nurses, but they don’t have a pathway to get on to the register like their partner did from the Philippines. Their only pathway is to totally retrain.

“We’re not utilising the people we have and not maximising their potential,” said Ms Parsons.

The new foundation, she said, aimed to help ensure a pathway was put into place for these nurses.

The other part of her organisation would be based in the Philippines and act as a funding body for nurse training and education.

Currently, Ms Parsons said, the country was facing nurse recruitment difficulties, in part due to a lack of accessibility to education in the profession.

“I want it to offer help with paying for certification, continued professional development (CPD), English exams, NMC registrations,” she told Nursing Times.

“There is a growing demand [in the Philippines] for nurses and not enough people are signing up,” she said.

“One hurdle... is the tuition. It’s a big issue because the cost of living there and the salaries are not in the right place and we don’t get university funding.”

This project has already had the assent of the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Junior, who recently met with Ms Parsons.

“I told him about what I’m trying to set up,” she said.

“It’s a big ambition and I’m really happy that the president is welcoming the fact I’m trying to help and give back to the ones back home, to the country which supplies so many nurses into our NHS.

“I’m just a stone in the ocean, but I want to start doing my bit,” she said, noting the scale of the challenge.

The formal launch of the foundation is expected later this year, with Ms Parsons continuing to work to get senior NHS figures, and people from the Philippines, to back it.

As reported by Nursing Times last month, recent changes to the nursing regulator’s English language requirements have been a “lifeline” for many internationally educated nurses.

Hundreds of nurses from overseas have sent off applications to join the UK register, since the Nursing and Midwifery Council began to allow employers to submit supporting information as evidence of English language proficiency.

The changes were implemented in February this year following a public consultation and many months of campaigning from nurses.