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Health Secretary Francisco Duque has the looks of a
middle-aged med rep, not a cabinet member in charge of the
country’s critical health concerns, a country with six of its top
ten killers all linked to poverty and lack of access to doctors and
health care. His barongs are immaculately pressed, just like his
hair that has the shine that can come only from frequent pampering.
Whether he patronizes Belo or
Calayan, we do not know. For sure, he is a guy who looks after how
he looks. You can’t catch him, even after a long day, looking
either harassed nor harried. He is always, in this age of sound
bites, camera-ready.
On his statements though, he is
off and out of control. The care and seriousness by which he regard
his grooming does not extend, clearly, to articulating his thoughts
on important issues of health.
Just recently, he had this press
statement in which he expressed real fears that the country was
being drained of its health workers and soon, very soon, we will be
importing health workers from other countries.
Does this guy know what he is
talking about? Where is this guy coming from?
I do not know what the exact
figure is but former Senator Boy Herrera , back to his old post as
secretary general of the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines,
knows a thing about unemployed nurses. They are legions and their
number is growing by the day, so with their sense of desperation.
His labor center has warned against the oversupply of nurses, nurses
pounding the streets for jobs.
They can’t get slots in local
hospitals. They can’t get jobs overseas. They are caught between
the deep blue sea and the hard rock. There are tens of thousands of
these unemployed nurses, all board exam passers .
You know what? Some exploitative
nursing schools with hospitals demand that their nursing passers
serve for two years as “volunteers” before they can get
underpaid nursing jobs. The nursing community knows these hospital
owners, some pretending to be paragons of civic virtue. You know how
much they pay their full-time nurses that work like horses? Below
P10,000 a month.
Tens of thousands of licensed
pharmacists languish in non-pharmacy jobs. Even the best and the
brightest end up as tinderos and tinderas at the giant drug chains.
For sure, they will not remotely practice the theories of
pharmacology dynamics in their entire lifetime.
Physical and occupation
therapists, just like nurses and pharmacists, turn to call center
and medical transcription jobs due to the dearth of jobs in the
allied medical profession.
There are more applicants to the
few vacant positions for doctors in district and community hospitals
now, more than at any point in our history. The expensive hospitals
have the pick of the graduates of the elite medical schools.
I do not know if Duque is aware
of these facts. Or, he just ignored the facts at ground level to
generate some stuff for his press releases. But it is not a good
sign that the good doctor has been mixing a lot of spin and
half-truths.
How can you task a guy who cannot
even get his figures right in charge of health concerns, the next
most important state concern after education? No wonder public
health is in such a sorry mess.
Duque’s prognosis on the
upcoming importation of health workers takes the ring of both the
ridiculous and the incredulous because of the current meltdown in
global financials. While Duque was nattering, Filipino overseas
workers, including those in the allied medical profession, were
expressing fears about the labor and employment impact of the
meltdown.
Lay-offs, retrenchments, scaling
down of work forces are uppermost in their minds, if not the real
possibility that they would have to return home and face the harsh
music here.
Lay-offs are not only a sad
occurrence at Wall Street and Fleet Street. At hospital rows in the
host countries that employ Filipino workers by the planeloads, the
best case scenario is a freeze in the hiring of additional nurses or
doctors or physical therapists.
Duque may just be putting on a
brave face amid this atmosphere of employment gloom for the workers
in the allied medical profession. But as the Bard said all lies end
up badly and the half-truths and spin from Duque may come to mar his
scrubbed , pressed and camera-ready looks. 
mvrong@yahoo.com
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