Embers of Care: Filipino Nurse John Yayen Turns Migrant Health Workers’ Stories Into Art

Nurses who have ever left one country to practice in another will recognize the quiet weight John Yayen, RN describes. He trained as a nurse in Palawan, Philippines, moved to Cambridge, England in 2020 after his wife took up a UK scholarship, and sat for his first full British winter without the mountains or snow he had seen on a visit to the United States. Just dark, flat, and cold.

Out of that winter came paint. And out of the paint came Embers of Care, a 100-portrait series honoring the internationally educated nurses, doctors, and care workers who keep the UK’s health system running.

In this episode of the Love n’ Leary Nursing Podcast, hosts Marion Leary, PhD, MPH, RN and Rebecca Love, RN, MSN, FIEL talk with Yayen about how a space-saving habit of donating paintings turned into a national project in collaboration with NHS trusts, the Royal College of Nursing, Counterpoints Arts, and Arts Council England.

For American nurses, Yayen’s story is not far away. Filipino immigrants represent the largest share of US-based immigrant registered nurses, making up 28% of the roughly 512,000 immigrant RNs working in the country and nearly 18% of all RNs in California. The pipeline is still active: more than 28,000 Filipino nursing graduates took the US licensure exam in 2024 alone. The institutions differ across the Atlantic. The transitions do not.

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Yayen’s path into both nursing and art is a sidelong one. He did not practice full-time nursing in the Philippines; he worked in his family’s business, taking on health-adjacent responsibilities and, as he puts it, “wearing a lot of hats.” He married in 2020. His wife had been awarded a UK scholarship, and when the pandemic closed in they decided to try the distance.

Yayen traveled to the UK for her graduation. They decided to stay for a mix of family and political considerations. UK nursing licensure took two years. By 2022, he was practicing as a nurse. By 2023, he was painting through his first full winter.

“I live in a tropical country, and I was really struggling with winter… Living in Cambridge, which is a very flat place, I resorted to doing artworks.”

He has stayed in a care home setting since. The paintings are the second shift.

Housing in Cambridge is expensive, and the flat Yayen shares with his wife is small. The first paintings were a storage problem as much as an artistic one. He asked around. Local institutions and hospitals said yes.

That first yes led to another, and another. Today, Embers of Care paintings hang in Royal Marsden Hospital in London, in the permanent collection of the Royal College of Nursing, and in NHS trusts from Oxford to Newcastle to Sheffield. The series has drawn support from Counterpoints Arts, a UK organization focused on arts, migration, and refugees, and from Arts Council England.

“I decided to donate one of my artworks in order for us to save space, and some institutions and hospitals accepted it, and the rest is history.”

Each portrait pairs a face with that worker’s own story. Yayen interviews his subjects first. Newly licensed nurses. Doctors. Care workers. Trust leaders. He listens for what they share across very different passages into the UK’s health system: the bank account that took weeks to open, the bus and train network that looked unreadable at first, the clinical culture that worked by rules nobody wrote down.

The migrant-healthcare-worker story in the UK is familiar to any US nurse who has helped onboard a colleague from the Philippines, Jamaica, Nigeria, or Ghana. In the US, the policy conversation tends to center on visas, wage differentials, and staffing agencies, as the Love n’ Leary hosts recently explored in their episode with nurse informatics leader Lulette Infante on Filipino nurse immigration. Yayen’s project moves the camera. It centers the person.

“We’re not just workers here, we’re also people. I want the locals… to know what are the nuances and layers.”

He is explicit that Embers of Care is for two audiences at once. For migrant nurses, the paintings are a mirror: a confirmation that other people have carried the same bags, filled out the same forms, missed the same birthdays at home. For local staff, patients, and leaders, the paintings are an invitation to see the hands that have been there all along.

Nurse.org has covered that same pattern on the US side through profiles like Glenn Dazo of @NurseDaddies, who immigrated from the Philippines in the early 2000s and now uses his platform to push back on the stereotypes that come with being a Filipino nurse in American hospitals.

Leary and Love ask Yayen what he would say to a nurse sitting on a creative life they have not started yet. His answer is short.

“I think my advice is just do it. If you want to be an artist, contribute to your hospital. If you want to be a singer, why not compose some songs?”

He frames creative work as both self-therapy and public contribution: a way to process what nursing does to the people who do it, and a way to leave something behind that is not a chart entry. The series has an endpoint. Yayen plans to stop at 100. Beyond that, he is open to the possibility that the next project will not look like a painting at all.

For nurses considering a cross-border move of their own, Nurse.org has a full guide to working in the US as a foreign-educated nurse.

Listen to the full conversation with John Yayen on the Love n’ Leary Nursing Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

🤔 Who at your facility would you want Yayen to paint, and what part of their story do you think other nurses need to see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.