Short on doctors and nurses, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is looking to the Philippines to help staff its health system, sending a delegation to Manila to explore how qualified Filipino health professionals could be brought in to work on the Pacific atolls.
Marshallese officials raised the staffing gap during talks at the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) Central Office on Friday, October 23, 2026, telling Philippine labor officials they were interested in tapping Filipino medical workers to fill vacant posts.
The island nation’s public health care rests on two hospitals, one in Majuro and one in Ebeye, and 59 health care centers in the outer atolls and islands, serving a population of about 42,000 under the 2021 census. Staffing troubles there are not new. The Marshall Islands Journal previously reported that the hospital on Ebeye faced a serious doctor shortage, made worse at the time by COVID entry restrictions that complicated hiring staff from abroad.
The Marshallese team was headed by Bremity Lakjohn, identified by the DMW as Minister in Assistance to the President, along with senior health officials. Lakjohn has a clinical background of his own: according to his Pacific Islands Forum profile, he holds nursing degrees and worked as a public health nurse in Ebeye and later in Majuro.
Across the table were DMW Undersecretary Felicitas Q. Bay, Assistant Secretary Levinson Alcantara, and Mary Grace Quilente, director of the department’s Pre-Employment and Government Placement Bureau.
No hiring deal came out of the meeting. Instead, the two governments agreed to take a closer look at how many health workers the RMI actually needs and what paperwork any recruitment would involve.
Philippine officials walked the visitors through the channels open to foreign employers seeking overseas Filipino workers. One is hiring through licensed recruitment agencies, which can only process job orders that have been verified. Another is a Government-to-Government (G2G) arrangement. When Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health used that route to recruit Filipino health workers last year, the Daily Tribune reported that applicants dealt directly with the DMW rather than going through a private recruitment agency.
Direct hiring is a third option, the DMW said, though any such arrangement must satisfy applicable requirements.
