The Filipino nurses attract interest because they are the first group of foreign nurses to have been recruited from abroad to work in Finland.

Their aim is to open the way for possibly hundreds of other nurses, whom their employers, the Finnish health care company Esperi Care, plans to bring into Finland in the next two years.

A group of four men and four women arrived in Helsinki on Wednesday. The first couple of days the group has toured Finnish offices, getting Finnish social security numbers, bank accounts, and bus passes. Their accommodation is also seen as excellent. The Philippine nurses have been accommodated in two apartments of about 70 square metres each. The men live in one, and the women live in the other.

“There is a washing machine and an electric stove. In the Philippines we wash our laundry by hand and we usually cook food on an open fire”, he says.

Baronda has come to Finland to care for old people and earn money.

“Here I can earn five or six times what I make in the Philippines”, he says.

In the Philippines, the monthly pay for a nurse is EUR 250. In Finland, the starting salary for a nurse is about EUR 1,600. Read more