How well those professionals communicate shapes the psychological well-being of the nurses in the room.
In late June, two nursing students from the University of Santo Tomas carried Philippine healthcare research to Bangkok and returned with the best oral presentation award from an international palliative care conference attended by more than 330 participants across 43 institutions worldwide. Their study examined how interprofessional communication shapes the psychological experience of operating room nurses in the Philippines — a quiet but consequential question about what it costs, inwardly, to work in spaces where precision and coordination are matters of life. The recognition is a small but meaningful signal that rigorous inquiry is flourishing in Philippine nursing education, and that its voice is finding a place in the larger global conversation about how we care for one another.
- Operating room nurses in the Philippines work at the intersection of high-stakes coordination and psychological pressure, yet the human cost of poor interprofessional communication in that environment has remained largely unstudied.
- Students Gacayan and Felix traveled to Bangkok to present their cross-sectional research before a genuinely international audience — 330 participants from 43 institutions spanning Thailand, the US, Sweden, China, Japan, and beyond — raising the stakes of what was at stake in the room.
- Their work won the conference's best oral presentation award, cutting through a field of global competitors and placing Philippine nursing research at the center of an international stage.
- The win signals a broader trajectory: UST's nursing program is producing research that can compete globally, and Philippine healthcare scholarship is gaining visibility in forums that shape how the world thinks about patient safety and staff well-being.
Two nursing students from the University of Santo Tomas traveled to Bangkok in late June and returned with an international award. John Lorenzo Gacayan and Enrico Luis Felix presented their research at the 2nd International Conference on Palliative Care and Family Health Nursing, held June 22 to 23, and won the conference's best oral presentation award among hundreds of researchers and practitioners gathered from across the globe.
Their study asked a practical but underexplored question: how does communication between different healthcare professionals shape the psychological experience of operating room nurses in the Philippines? Using a cross-sectional design — a snapshot of a population at a single point in time — the research was co-authored by classmates Clarisse Kyla Frias and Francine Ghosn, and guided by faculty advisor and doctoral nurse Gian Carlo Torres.
The conference was organized by Thammasat University's Faculty of Nursing under the theme 'Holistic Healing with Heart: Innovation and Compassion in Palliative and Family Health Care.' More than 330 students, faculty, and healthcare workers attended from 43 partner institutions across Thailand, the United States, Sweden, China, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
The award carries meaning beyond the moment. Operating room nursing demands precision and constant coordination, and how well a team communicates has real consequences for both patient safety and the psychological well-being of the nurses in the room. By studying this in a Philippine context, Gacayan and Felix addressed a gap in the literature while contributing knowledge directly relevant to their own healthcare system. For UST — one of the Philippines' leading research universities — the recognition affirms the quality of mentorship available to its students and places Philippine nursing scholarship in a global conversation it has long deserved to join.
Two nursing students from the University of Santo Tomas traveled to Thailand in late June and returned with an international award. John Lorenzo Gacayan and Enrico Luis Felix presented their research at the 2nd International Conference on Palliative Care and Family Health Nursing, held June 22 to 23 at a hotel in Bangkok's northern suburbs. Their work won the conference's best oral presentation award—recognition that placed them among hundreds of researchers and practitioners gathered from across the globe.
The study Gacayan and Felix presented examined how communication between different healthcare professionals shapes the way operating room nurses in the Philippines experience their work psychologically. It was a cross-sectional investigation, the kind that captures a snapshot of a population at a single moment in time. The research was co-authored by two other students, Clarisse Kyla Frias and Francine Ghosn, along with their faculty advisor, Gian Carlo Torres, who holds a doctorate in nursing.
The conference itself was substantial in scope. Thammasat University's Faculty of Nursing organized the event under the banner "Holistic Healing with Heart: Innovation and Compassion in Palliative and Family Health Care." More than 330 students, faculty members, administrators, and healthcare workers attended, drawn from 43 partner institutions spread across multiple continents. The participating organizations came from Thailand, the United States, Sweden, China, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia—a genuinely international assembly focused on how to care for people at the end of life and support families through illness.
For a nursing program in the Philippines, winning recognition at such a conference signals something worth noting. The University of Santo Tomas, where these students study, is one of the country's leading private research universities and consistently ranks among the world's top 1000 institutions. The university spans multiple disciplines—natural sciences, health sciences, applied sciences, social sciences, theology, business, and management—and positions itself as an institution oriented toward research and social impact.
The award itself reflects the quality of the work Gacayan and Felix brought to Bangkok. Operating room nursing is a specialized field that demands precision, quick thinking, and coordination with surgeons, anesthesiologists, and other team members. How well those professionals communicate with each other, and how that communication affects the psychological well-being of the nurses in the room, is a practical question with real consequences for both patient safety and staff health. By studying this relationship in a Philippine context, the students were addressing a gap in the literature while also contributing knowledge that could improve conditions in their own healthcare system.
The recognition carries weight beyond the immediate moment. It places Philippine nursing research on an international stage, demonstrates that rigorous work is happening in the country's universities, and shows that students from the region can compete and excel in global academic forums. For UST's nursing program, it is evidence of the quality of mentorship and research training available to students there. For Gacayan and Felix personally, it is validation of months of work—designing the study, collecting data, analyzing results, and then traveling across the region to present findings to an audience of peers and experts.
Citações Notáveis
The study examined how communication between different healthcare professionals shapes the way operating room nurses in the Philippines experience their work psychologically.— Research focus of Gacayan and Felix
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
What made this particular study worth presenting at an international conference? There must be hundreds of nursing research projects happening every year.
The specificity matters. They weren't asking a vague question about communication. They were looking at how the quality of talk between different professionals—surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses—actually changes the psychological experience of the people in the operating room. That's concrete. That's measurable. And it's happening in the Philippines, which means the findings apply to a healthcare system that doesn't always get studied.
Why does the Philippines matter in this context?
Because most of the research on healthcare communication comes from wealthy countries with different resources, different staffing patterns, different pressures. When you study it in the Philippines, you're asking: does this pattern hold here? What's different? That's how knowledge actually grows—not by assuming one answer fits everywhere.
The conference had 43 partner institutions. That's a lot of coordination. What does that tell you about palliative care as a field right now?
It tells you the field is taking itself seriously internationally. Palliative care—helping people die well, managing pain, supporting families—used to be seen as secondary work. Now universities from Sweden to South Korea are organizing conferences around it. That's a shift in how medicine thinks about what matters.
These students won an award. But what happens next? Does this change anything for operating room nurses in the Philippines?
That depends on whether the research gets read, whether it gets cited, whether it influences how hospitals think about communication training. The award gets their work noticed. But the real impact comes if someone in a hospital in Manila reads this study and decides to change how their teams talk to each other. That's the longer arc.