MANILA – In response to President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s directive in his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday to bring healthcare services closer to the people, the Department of Health plans to create telemedicine or telehealth services nationwide.
On Tuesday, Department of Health Officer-in-Charge Maria Rosario Vergeire said during the post-SONA economic briefing at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City that dynamic provision of healthcare services must gear toward technology and innovations and not just rely on the usual approaches to prepare for future emergencies or pandemic.
“We’re going to establish further our telemedicine services or telehealth services so that we can continuously decongest our facilities and we can also reach those far-flung areas in the country,” she said.
Additionally, specialty care care facilities and primary care facilities would be created in various regions of the country to increase Filipinos’ access to high-level healthcare facilities.
The DOH, she said, targets to base all its decisions and instructions to local government units on scientific data and evidence through strengthened epidemiology and surveillance units.
“That is already part of the budget that we have proposed to the Department of Budget and Management for the Department of Health,” Vergeire said.
She stated that scientific evidence generation and recommendations should come from experts in the field.
“In support of the directives of the President, we’re going to have the Philippine Center for Disease Control whereby we’re going to have high level technical capacity, hiring experts, hiring scientists so that we can be able to better manage emerging and re-emerging diseases,” she said.
She also stated that the DOH plans to facilitate early diagnosis by setting up public health laboratories focusing on different diseases in order to prepare for the threat of emerging and re-emerging like Covid-19.
Vergeire said self-sufficiency is important in terms of logistics and commodities especially in times of pandemic.
“We all know that our vaccines, for example, for Covid-19, came internationally. We don’t have our local source. So in line also with the directives of the President, we are in support to work with the Department of Science and Technology to set up the Virology Institute of the Philippines, whereby, eventually, we can be able to locally manufacture our technologies, such as vaccines for these specific infectious diseases,” she said.
Improved healthcare facilities and services would be futile if there are not enough medical professionals to man and deliver them respectively.
“If there are emergencies or this kind of pandemic of this scale, there should be a pool of medical personnel that we can easily tap from and that they can easily supplement the different needs for healthcare workers or health human resources across the different facilities of government and the private sector as well,” she added.
Regarding the planned improvements in the health sector, she stated that the DOH stresses the significance of an inter-agency task force as a governance mechanism.
In case of emergencies and pandemics, according to Vergeire, the task force must be able to manage the first two levels of response of the country.
The National Risk Reduction and Management Council must also have an institutionalized system or organization to appropriately implement the policy directions from the task force, she added.
