Boardroom Tea: Where is former Philippine Azkal Armand del Rosario now?

He walked into the make-up room at ABS-CBN to prep for The Boardroom and, don’t laugh, I had no idea who he was. My only excuse is that I have never covered sports as a reporter. The only sport I know is played in stock markets, and its scoring is nothing like football.

After the interview, Armand mentioned that he had once been a sports commentator years ago somewhere in the building. That was all I needed to start researching.

Armand and his brother Anton both played for the Azkals, had since retired from football and both had become serious entrepreneurs. Armand, in fact, is in a very interesting industry — the potentially $8.6-billion medical simulation industry in the Philippines. 

Armand explained that medical simulation, when used for healthcare education, is expected to greatly elevate the quality of care for Philippine nurses studying in schools and universities, those who are already working the hospital rounds, and finally those who are deployed overseas or soon to be deployed.

Here is where it gets fascinating. This industry is starting to get a lot of attention. Del Rosario said during The Boardroom interview that many Filipino registered nurses have turned to call center and other business process outsourcing jobs. But now this industry is challenged by artificial intelligence and many of the registered nurses may require retraining to go back to the field competitively.

Del Rosario’s Healthcare Simulation Society of the Philippines is working with nursing schools, healthcare institutions, and organizations in using healthcare simulation methodologies and technologies to improve clinical readiness, patient safety, faculty development, and preparation of Filipino nurses for real-world healthcare experience.

It made a lot of sense to me, since I am taking care of my 88-year old mom and interact a lot with nurses when we are in a hospital. I will be a lot more confident if nurses don’t go from classroom to emergency room. Instead, they should have simulation exercises on, for example, how to handle a deteriorating patient so that if they make mistakes initially, they don’t hurt a real person. That should also be important to a hospital boardroom or a university boardroom. Equipping nurses with this kind of education may look like an additional expense on a spreadsheet, but it can also be seen as a risk-reduction line. If you count the errors in a hospital daily, it is possible the expense will look cheap.

Oh, and fun fact: Armand is married to gorgeous model Georgia Schulze, sister of ANC anchor Lexi Schulze. They have four girls. He practically beamed talking about his daughter who recently graduated from university. On a related topic that is also highly critical for boardrooms everywhere is the latest numbers on stunting. According to the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (DOST-FNRI), stunting among children under five reached 25.3% in its 2025 Updating Survey, up from 23.6% in 2023.

It is the first nationwide increase in more than a decade. The survey ran from April 23, 2025 to March 31, 2026, and covered 91.5% of target households across all 118 provinces and highly urbanized cities.

Why should boardrooms care enough to spend on food and nutrition programs for 0-5 year olds? I understand how a logistics company for example or a tech company might feel that that is not their concern. 

The answer? Apart from the very humanitarian reason that every child has a right to healthy food, there is also the very practical and material reason that they will be your workforce in 15-20 years. Hiring is already hard these days. Humans are a company’s best asset. If one-fourth of today’s 0-5 year olds suffer from stunting that cannot be reversed after age 5, then we all have a productivity issue that will further make the Philippines an economic laggard.

Brain stunting and nutrition are the most important and most urgent human and economic crisis in the country today. No, it is not the impeachment or the flood control scandals.