PhilHealth owes hospitals P27B, vows to pay within 3 months
THE PHILIPPINE Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) owes local hospitals about P27 billion, which it expects to pay in three months, its president and chief executive officer told congressmen on Wednesday.
“Within 90 days, we will try to pay a very high percentage of the P27 billion,” PhilHealth President and Chief Executive Officer Emmanuel R. Ledesma, Jr. told the House committee on appropriations.
Party-list Rep. Wilbert T. Lee noted that hospitals have been unable to accept poor patients or have yet to pay their staff due to PhilHealth’s recurring debt.
PhilHealth, an attached agency of the Department of Health (DoH), has a P101-billion budget for next year.
Meanwhile, Deputy Minority Leader and Party-list Rep. France L. Castro urged the Health department to use contractual nurses to fill in more than 4,000 positions for nurses in hospitals.
Health Secretary Teodoro J. Herbosa told the committee the Philippines had 4,468 unfilled positions for nurses in hospitals nationwide as of June 30 this year.
“[If we have] 13,975 contractual nurses [and there are more than] 4,000 open positions, why can’t we fill this in?” Ms. Castro asked. “You say that there aren’t any nurses applying, yet contractual nurses are available so why can’t they fill in these positions?”
Mr. Herbosa said the unfilled nursing positions in hospitals require specific skills. “Sometimes, the nurse item is very specific so it’s an OR (operating room) nurse or an ICU (intensive care unit) nurse or an ER (emergency room) nurse.”
“Either the hospitals do not have applicants or usually it’s in transition, so when they retire or they leave, we have to wait for the Department of Budget and Management to give us authority to fill [in these positions,]” he added.
But Ms. Castro noted that some hospitals allow private nurses to care for patients.
Mr. Herbosa said contractual nurses are deployed in local government units under DoH’s Nurse Deployment Project.
The Philippines has been suffering from a “brain drain” involving nursing graduates, with 18,104 Filipinos taking the licensure examinations for nurses in the United States from January to June this year.
DoH also cited the lack of mental health specialists in the country.
The Philippines only has 651 psychiatrists and 133 psychologists, Mr. Herbosa said. “We will coordinate with CHED (Commission on Higher Education) for their representation to make sure that more students actually enter into the fields of mental health.” — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
