Our speaker, Atty. Michael Joseph Kotarski, is a lawyer from Michigan. He came to talk to us of the legal issues involved when working in the US. He started his talk by telling us of the major advantages of Filipino Health workers. He mentioned that Filipinos were pretty experienced when it came to hands on training. However, there is one thing that we needed to know that we may not neccesarily be informed about already. That is the concept of Patient Needs.

Patient Needs is the major destination for Health care in the US. This generally talks about the decisions revolving around ethics. He also discussed another important matter involving the need for documenting and recording our services rendered to the patient.
It made me proud that he informed the audience that the Roman Catholic Church has the highest ethical standard in the US. This means that the final decisions of what is right in terms of ethics, is done by the Church.


Atty. Michael made mention of three important powers of attorney when it came to the decision making part of the patient.
1.DPOA (durable power of Attorney) on Money Matters
2.DPOA on Medical Matters
3.PAD (Patient advocate Designation)




The first two powers are rather self explanatory, while the third power focused on the medical designation of the patient (especially comatose patients) which will include the termination of a medical treatment. (pulling the plug)


If there is no DPOA and etc. have two options as assigned by the court.
a.Conservatorship- someone aside from the court as requested by the hospital to make credible decisions for the patient who is unable to make a decision.
b.Guardianship- a legal guardian of the patient

Apart from all those things, I also learned a new word.
We all know what a hospital is, and what hospitalize, hospitable, or hospitalization are.
What's Hospitalist?

According to Atty. Michael, they are the ones assigned for the PAD in the three powers of attorney.

Another noteworthy mention of the speaker was that Filipinos have a way of handling life and death(mostly death) matters that patients in the US feel more understood when Filipinos announce their situations.

Oh, and for the curious ones, Atty. Michael share that the average income for the nurses abroad is 25$ an hour, meaning for every hour that you are working, you get 1200 php. Wow!
While private nurses earn $6000 per month which is equivalent to 288000 php. Double wow.

The last thing I was able to hear from Atty. Michael was him mentioning Filipinos being too submissive.




Anyway, that's all for this post. I had to run for another event somewhere else.

BTW, sooooo sorry for the uber late post.