In Valenzuela City, north of Manila, Irish Ocreto’s husband and mother take turns looking after her daughter Martina. At the same time, she works in a retirement home in Oldenburg, in Lower Saxony, Germany. She says that the hospitals there offer better pay for nurses like her. She plans to bring her family to Germany to live with her in two years.

In a public hospital in Batangas City, Mark John Thomas D. Buquiz supervises nurses from various departments, signing a thick stack of sick leave forms every morning. According to him, overtime work without additional compensation is the “new normal.” He is waiting for the results of his job application in the US.

The Philippines struggles to meet the recommended nurse-to-patient ratio as Filipino healthcare workers move to countries like Germany, where they can earn ten times more.

These images of Irish’s family and the healthcare workers at Batangas Medical Center were produced while I was on assignment with writer Maria Stöhr for Der Spiegel.