As the manning capital of the world, the Philippines supplies almost every vessel that sails the seven seas with Filipino marines and marine engineers on board. As the biggest health service provider, almost all hospitals in the US, UK and Saudi Arabia have a Filipino doctor, nurse, medical technologist or physical therapist. These Filipinos are employed because of their education and capabilities. However, the extent to which they remain competitive, given the increasing demands of the global market, is the accountability of quality education. If we want to gain more international respect and recognition, we should aim for higher international comparability and standards. It was the aim of the study to benchmark educational practices in Philippine maritime and nursing institutions with best practices in the APEC Region. It was not intended to rank the respondent institutions in any way. It looked into the input, process and output of maritime and nursing education. The benchmarking activities were focused on the quality of inputs to the educational process, the quality of the process itself and the quality of the outputs from the process. Through this benchmarking study, the comparative advantage of Philippine maritime and nursing institutions were identified in the study.
