The Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), together with its Board of Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy and other concerned stakeholders, is set to meet next week after the recent banning of Filipino physical therapists from taking their licensure exams in the United States.

PRC Chairman Nicholas Lapeña made the announcement to show the commission’s resolve in addressing the problems caused by the ban on physical therapists from the Philippines, Egypt, Pakistan, and India from taking exams conducted by the Federation of State Boards of Physical Therapy (FSBPT).

The FSBPT is composed of 53 physical therapy licensing authorities that conduct an annual licensure exam for physical therapists in the US.

“We already referred it (the ban) to the Board of Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy to submit a report on the issue,” Lapeña said.

However, despite the PRC’s initiative, PRC secretariat Carlos Almelor stressed that review centers are not under its jurisdiction.

Review centers, which cater to different regulated profession like nursing and physical therapy, are not controlled by any government agency.

An attempt by the government to institutionalize review centers was done during the past administration through Republic Act 8981 or the PRC Modernization Act of 2000, but the Supreme Court ruled it as unconstitutional.

The FSBPT issued a ban on Filipino therapists which would last not less than one year after the Philippines failed to comply with the conditions the federation set in 2007.

There were 1,331 newly hired physical therapists deployed in the US from 2007 to 2009. An estimated 600 Filipino therapists who took the exam in 2005 and 2006 would be affected by the sanction.

In a report submitted by the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) in 2007, FSBPT filed a case against the Saint Louis Review Center (SLRC) in the Philippines after the National Bureau if Investigation (NBI) found out that SLRC was copying some parts of its National Physical Therapy Exam (NPTE) in 2005 and 2006 as review questions to its reviewers.

The Manila-based SLRC is said to be owned by a Gerald Martin, a Roger Tong, and a radio announcer, Carlito Balita. Balita in a television interview later denied that he is a part-owner of the review center.

“The FSBPT initially planned to invalidate the scores of all Filipino examinees from 2005 to 2006 and to withhold the results of the 2007 NPTE,” the report said.

But after the DoLE convened the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), the Department of Foreign Affairs, Intellectual Property Owners, NBI, and the PRC, to come up with a remedial solution to resolve the issue, the FSBPT decided to withdraw the sanctions against the examinees if the Philippines would follow its recommendations.