Monday, July 14, 2014

Health Workers, holDAPed: Overworked, Underpaid Health Workers disgusted over PNoy’s DAP


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". ###

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