Philippine health care system: Who's to blame?

Philippine health care system: Who’s to blame? By: Anthony Ngayan We all have read and heard the issues concerning the American health care system on the television, radio and newspaper. The shortage of medical professionals, especially nurses and caregivers, in industrialized countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom has caused a massive departure of certified health workers from the Philippines.

From an article entitled A Sick Health Care System, the former president of the Philippine Medical Association (PMA), Dr. Bu Castro, said that the nation’s health care system would “certainly collapse” if the number of medical workers migrating to other wealthier countries continues to increase.

We can no longer overlook the reality. In a 2005 research done by Dr. Jaime Galvez-Tan (Vice-Chancellor for Research – University of the Philippines Manila) entitled The Brain Drain Phenomenon and Its Implications for Health, since 1994 more than 100,000 medical workers have left the country. The economic uncertainty and the political instability in the Philippines have greatly affected the decisions of Filipino doctors to go abroad to find greener pastures. Medical graduates in the Philippines have been migrating to prosperous nations since the beginning of the 20th century but the increase in their numbers from recent years is very alarming.

The current “migration” of Filipino medical workers to richer nations has crippled the most vulnerable sector in the Philippine Society – the poor. In the most recent statistics (2006) approximately 30% of the population lives in poverty and most of them reside in the remote areas of the country. These people only have the government-employed health workers to help them but the doctors (and most are just nurses or midwives) in these rural areas began to leave and apply for work visas to other nations.

So who’s to blame for all of this?

I can talk about all the problems in our country’s health care throughout this article but I won’t. We all know who’s to blame. Us! We, Filipinos, have accused each other for the failures that have happened to our nation. And personally I’m sick and tired of this fact. And yes it is a fact.

Throughout the history of our nation, we have showed the world what we can do when we are united in one cause. Our revolt against Spain in the 19th century and the People Power Revolution in 1986 are just examples. We used to have the second most powerful economy in Asia in the 1960s, just next to Japan. Our Asian neighbours such as South Korea and Singapore used to look up on us for our economic ties to the west and our knowledge of the English language. But now, we are lagging behind. What happened?

Corruption enveloped the rich and the powerful and poverty ravaged our nation. All of these have caused our economy to weaken and have contributed to our loss of the best and the brightest medical workers of our time to other countries. We have been blaming each other for years and, actually, it got us nowhere.

We have become too busy criticizing each other that we are now feeling the consequences of our actions. Now, our healthcare system is extremely fragile and there is less and less certified and experienced health workers left to care for our growing population. It’s time for us to move forward, time to let go of the past and start to think about our future. Yes, it is our own fault that we have lost our golden era but we should not live on those bittersweet memories. Instead, we should learn from those mistakes we have made and hopefully not to do them again in the future.

Sources:
www.bulatlat.com
www.up.du.ph

Anthony Ngayan is a member of ANAK and a student at the University of Manitoba. If you would like to learn more about ANAK programming and how you can support, visit www.anak.ca

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