A few days ago, Marcelo Tecson shared over email his blog dedicated to helping out nursing students. A very relevant niche for Filipinos. There’s increasing demand for healthcare workers in the west, as their respective populations age, and nursing schools and courses are springing up all over to help students take advantage of this opportunity. Anecdotal success stories, such as a Filipina nurse successfully making a good living in London, only serve to increase interest in the profession.

There is a lot to like about Philippine Nurse, such as the extensive list of links to relevant resources, like licensure exam application forms, other nursing blogs, and online educational resources. And of course, what blog would be complete without news items related to its niche? Marcelo also displays an awareness of his community, maintaining a Friendster account for the blog and a chat widget. I suspect that any aspiring or active nurse would find the links and items on the sidebar very useful.

Which leads me to the actual content itself. On one end, you’ve got original commentary and analysis (The wording of Is Ban on Doctors’ Migration Symptomatic of Lack of Economic Expertise, Innovativeness, and Fairness? betrays Marcelo’s knowledge of nursing vocabulary). On the other, random postings of nursing procedure. Which I don’t completely understand.

Isn’t the information already available on this textbook? Even if Marcelo wants to highlight crucial procedures for nursing students to learn, posting them in their entirety violates the textbook’s copyright. If the textbook is standard reading, can’t you just post the page number and section title?

So my piece of unsolicited advice for Philippine Nurse is: focus more on original commentary, advice, and creating discussion among your readers. And avoid posting information that’s already available somewhere else. IMHO, this will make Philippine Nurse even more useful to its readers, by providing what they’ll only find there.

(Of course, I’m assuming all this and I’m not a nursing student, much less a nurse. Maybe Marcelo can clear up any possible confusion on my end?)