Author: Napaphat Satchanawakul
AIT Library Call Number: AIT Thesis no.GD-13-07
Year: 2013
Academic Program: Gender and Development Studies (GDS)
Type: Thesis (M. Sc.) – Asian Institute of Technology, 2013
Examination Committee: Kyoko Kusakabe (Chairperson); Yumiko Yamamoto, Soparth Pongquan, Philippe Doneys (Examination Committee Members)
Abstract: As the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) will be officially launched in 2015, the free flow of skilled labor and free(r) flow of investment – the ke y elements for being the single market and production base of the AEC, seem to create attractive options for medical personnel in Thailand. This paper analyzed the possibility of Thai nurses to change their workplace – from rural to urban and from urban to overseas – and the implication of such change to the health services in rural Thailand. Thai nurses suffer from low status. Registered nurses are treated distinctively inferior to other medical professions in terms of working conditions and compensations. Their status further deteriorated in the last 10 years when the government refused to provide new registered nurses status of civil servant. Although the protest by nurses in 2012 made the government to promise improvements, in reality, the situation has not changed. Bad working condition and low status would encourage nurses to seek better jobs outside the province and outside the countries – nurses in the capital might go abroad, while vacancies in cities might be fill by rural nurses. The results of que stionnaire surveys from 565 nurses (350 nurses from rural public hospitals and 215 nurses from private hospitals in Bangkok), the new generation of nurses (25 – 30 years of age) who are working as non – civil servant in rural public hospitals showed interest i n and tend to move out from the provinces to work in private hospitals in Bangkok. They do not aim to move outside country due to their lack of language skill and readiness for working outside the countries. Meanwhile, nurses (25 – 30 years of age) in some w ell – known private hospitals in Bangkok tend to move out to work abroad. However, ASEAN countries seem to be less preferred than Western countries (ex. USA, UK, European countries). Al
Scholarship Donor(s): Royal Thai Government Fellowship
Note: A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Gender and Development Studies, School of Environment, Resources and Development
Advisory: Full-text is available at https://library.ait.ac.th/ (accessible to local ip address only)
