PRESS RELEASE
July
14, 2014
References:
Bong Bulanadi, Tondo Medical Center Employees
Association Vice President, 522-92-46
Gary Liberal, Jose Reyes Medical Center operating room nurse, Mobile
No.09183104698
Jossel
I Ebesate, AHW National President, Mobile No. 0918 927 6381
Public health workers hold a protest rally today, July 14
in front of the Department of Health (DOH) to condemn the department and the
Aquino government for continuously neglecting government hospitals. Health
workers, particularly nurses are growing tired of the government's failure to
address the chronic understaffing in most government hospitals.
According to Mr. Bong Bulanadi, Tondo Medical Center Employees
Vice President, "in Tondo Medical Center, nurses are obliged to go on
16-24 hours duty and nurse to patient ratio is 1:40-45 per shift, a severe
understaffed working condition. This is
far from the Department of Health standard of nurse-patient ratio which
is 1:12. In addition, salaries remain below the poverty threshold, while on the other hand, it frustrates us when we learn
that the Aquino government is squandering billions in government money through
Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP)."
He reiterated that the P157 Billion wasted on DAP is more than enough to
address the chronic understaffed working condition in public hospitals. “How can a nurse provide quality service to
patients with this inhuman and degrading
condition?”, he added.
Aside
from understaffed situation health workers also express their vehement
opposition to the continuing privatization of government health facilities.
“Health workers can not simply be bought by government's shallow reasoning that
it can not afford to fund the improvement of the critical capacity of
government health facilities without the infusion of private capital through
Public-Private Partnership/privatization,”Jossel Ebesate, AHW president
emphasized. If government can
unscrupulously spend billions from the said DAP fund, that money could have
tripled the annual funding of all government health facilities, supplies and
medicines which is sufficient enough to provide affordable or even free quality
services to the people.
Health workers feel that the current government is useless in
addressing the people's health needs. They are calling for the resignation of
Health Secretary Ona for his obvious failure to resolve the perennial health
problems of the people and his pro-privatization stand. They also support the
ouster of President Aquino and Department of Budget and Management (DBM)
Secretary Florencio Abad for the lack of moral ascendancy to govern after their
involvement in a billion peso DAP controversy and failure to resolve the
rampant corruption in the government. According to Gary Liberal, Jose Reyes
Medical Center nurse, "While billions of pesos have been wasted in
bureaucratic corruption, millions of lives have been sacrificed needlessly due
to lack of basic services". ###
