Our Community.
Billions of people around the world face health threats every day and Filipinos are no less excluded in this figure. Hence, it is by far that we have to address these circumstances that may indubitably and possibly affect our well being as nation. However, Filipinos are not prepared in confronting these threats for we are not equipped. It is for a fact that substantial number of Filipinos around the archipelago are in dire need of health care.
The health of every Filipino is one of the primary concerns of our destitute country today. We need to be better equipped to address the increasingly complex challenges of the Filipino population in the 21st century. From persisting problems to new and emerging public health threats, we need to be flexible enough to respond to these evolving environments.
One of the main drawbacks in our health situation in the country is inequity in the health system. To address this downside, our Department of Health (DOH) developed Universal Health Care (UHC), referred to as “Kalusugan Pangkalahatan”, which is the “provision to every Filipino of the highest possible quality of health care that is accessible, efficient, equitably distributed, adequately funded, fairly financed, and appropriately used by an informed and empowered public.” Accordingly, it intends to ensure that each Filipino shall receive quality and affordable health benefits. Moreover, it is in reality that the country faces a double burden of disease with the majority of the 10 leading causes of the morbidity being communicable diseases and the leading causes of mortality in the country being mainly non-communicable diseases. Over the last five decades, non-communicable diseases steadily increased while communicable diseases diminished in scale. This is still alarming and this needs our attention, one amongst several problems we face in the frontier of health in the Philippines.
As problems spark, we cannot take in hand all of them. We must take measure at the ground level first. Communities nationwide can be helped through Primary Health Care. And as medical students, we have one of the major roles in managing this, to help provide solutions to problems concerning health of the people and communities remote from accessing care they need. This dogma is one of the advocacies and objectives of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University School of Medicine, a medical school which disseminates its medical students to far-flung depressed communities in Mindanao to be responsive to the ever changing health care developments and requisites of the people marginally living in those areas.
One of these communities is Barangay San Vicente, Municipality of Mahayag, Zamboanga del Sur. We, medical students, were sent to this impoverish community to empower the people and help improve the availability, accessibility, and quality health care services. Advocacy regarding community health is our primary objective, and engagement with the people is our first responsibility. On the process, a Comprehensive Health Plan (CHP) would serve as guide in creating the community into a more accountable and committed body, which portrays the foremost role in planning, delivering, and evaluating health services.
In this century, health should be a shared responsibility, between the people and the health care providers, involving equitable access to essential and fundamental care, and collective defense against domestic threats. No matter the challenge, we are geared up to share this responsibility with the community of Barangay San Vicente. Though the road is narrow, stretched, and dim, hope still lurks in the hearts of people coveting change. Efforts are ought to be directed towards reversing the ominous state of health our country possesses. Furthermore, reforms must labor in the direction of constructing a health care system that every Filipino deserves. Each Juan dela Cruz merits health care he needs; notwithstanding time, despite of its onerous access, and heedless of its undeserving affluent costs.
