Connected by Care: The Skilled Migration of Philippine Healthcare Workers to the UK and the Reconfiguration of Transnational Family Relationships

Abstract

This thesis investigates the skilled migration of healthcare workers, mostly nurses, originating from the Philippines to the UK and how relationships between migrants and parts of their families who remain in the Philippines are reconfigured through migration. Central to this thesis is notions of care which encompasses an instrumental part of human social life. Care, in this regard, cuts across the scholarships on skilled migration and transnational families. This thesis engages with care in two ways; first, the skilled migration of workers in healthcare sectors and second, the care exchanges within and between transnational families separated by distance. However, migration studies literature has predominantly focused on the economic aspects and macro-level issues of the skilled migration of nurses and less so on the social dynamics of these particular skilled migrants’ lives including the crucial role of families in these migration journeys. Therefore, this thesis aims to explore the factors enabling the skilled migration of Filipino migrant healthcare workers (P-HCWs), their everyday lived experiences in the UK and the reconfiguring of transnational family relations from the perspectives of those who move and those who remain behind. To understand these experiences, the thesis employed qualitative approaches, in particular, in-depth interviews and participant observations with 21 P-HCWs and 20 family members who remained in the Philippines.

This thesis has three major empirical findings. First, the factors leading to skilled migration of healthcare workers are more complex than previously understood. Alongside economic motivations, the social, cultural, historical legacies and structural conditions of the Philippines and the UK were equally integral in shaping these migrations. Second, this thesis found that definitions of transnational families are expansive, whereby this thesis has de-centred Eurocentric notions of family as universal in migration literature, which also impacts how their relationships are reconfigured through migration. Third and finally, the experiences of P-HCWs are varied in terms of how they fare in their working professional lives, as well as their transnational family lives in the UK where it has also explored how they have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Overall, the thesis’ contributions to migration literature are threefold: first, it enriches our understandings on migration decision-making, where the family emerged as a key factor in this process. Second, it provides invaluable insights into the multidirectional and interdependent practices of care among the P-HCWs and their families. Third, it provides empirical insights into the labour segmentation and career trajectories of Filipino nurses in the UK.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Bianca Marie Gutierrez Luna: orcid.org/0009-0000-6225-1401

ORCID for Julie Vullnetari: orcid.org/0000-0003-1578-8622

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