“After seeing our health response, I am sure that all of you will agree that our present system has been and continues to be inadequate. We have seen how our public hospitals in Metro Manila collapsed during the height of the pandemic.”
So goes a part of Bataan 1st District Representative Geraldine B. Roman’s privilege speech last June 3 via video conference with her colleagues from the Philippine House of Representatives titled,”The lessons we have to learn from the Covid-19 crisis.”
Roman said that the hospitals in the provinces barely coped with the situation due to a lack of resources.
She also mentioned that health professionals in many provinces do not even have enough personal protective equipments or PPEs resulting in hospital outbreaks.
In Bataan alone, as reported by the Provincial Health Office, local transmissions occured mostly inside the Bataan General Hospital and Medical Center that reportedly forced the management along with the provincial government led Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) to make it exclusive for Covid-19 cases in the province.
Also, some mayors of Bataan have contested health protocol reports and even insisted that their respective towns are still Covid-19-free due to the absence of local transmissions in their communities.
“This is unacceptable. To get sick in hospitals in remote provinces is tantamount to a death sentence. Our Covid response has been quite late and deficient in protocols and equipment despite the glaring warning signs from other countries. We could have been more proactive,” Congresswoman Roman lamented.
The second-termer lawmaker also cited that the country’s health system also “lacks investments and a masterplan that will systematically guide whatever investment that has to be made in the right direction and at the right time and also, there is a need for decentralization.”
Rep. Roman also mentioned recently passed laws like the Universal Health Care Act, but she believes the government “have not taken steps to facilitate its full implementation.
“We need to get our act right and we need to do it now. Bakit hindi natin samantalahin ang pagkakataong ito? But how can we, if our DOH officials dismiss a simple and basic legislative measure I have authored mandating minimum standards in terms of equipment and services depending on a hospital’s category,” she added.
Roman also believes that there should be no differences in equipment and services between hospitals belonging to the same category whether they are in the provinces or in Metro Manila.
As of this writing, the Department of Health has reported 21,895 total number of Covid-19 cases in the country with 4,530 recoveries and 1,003 fatalities.
In Bataan province, Governor Abet Garcia reported thru his Facebook page that 141 Covid-19 patients have recovered out of 161 confirmed cases with 9 deaths and only 11 active cases as of June 4, 2020. (MHIKE CIGARAL).