Baguio City council lobbies for PCSO Cordillera office

By Ramon Dacawi 

BAGUIO CITY -- If this looks and sounds more of an opinion piece than a straight news item, it’s so intended, to catch your attention and convince you to help the city council lobby for what it pushed last Monday.

            

By unanimous vote and “on motion of all and seconded by all”, the city council, acting with a deep sense of urgency, adopted a resolution authored by city councilor Peter Fianza for the setting up of district and regional offices of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office in the Cordillera and in the Autonomous Region in Mindanao to serve thousands of indigent and seriously ill patients in the two regions.

As councilor Fianza explained, the PCSO recently decentralized the processing and approval of fund assistance applications to cash-strapped patients, from its office at the Lung Center along E. Rodriguez Avenue in Quezon City to the district and regional offices.  

            

While the decentralization brings closer PCSO’s services to the people, it serves better the needs of other regions than those of the people of the Cordillera and the Autonomous Region in Mindanao.

            

The poorest regions in the country notwithstanding their wealth in natural resource, the Cordillera and  the Autonomous Region in Mindanao are the only two among the 17 regions in the country that do not have a district or regional office of the PCSO.     

            

Residents of the two regions now have to go to the nearest regions with district or regional offices. Patients coming from the Cordillera now have to apply for medical support at the PCSO Region 1 office  in Urdaneta, Pangasinan which is already swamped by patients coming from the Ilocos.

            

Curiously, some regions have more than one district or regional offices. Region 3 has four, in Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac and Nueva Ecija. So does the Bicol Region, whose four offices are located in Sorsogon, Albay, Camarines Norte and Camarines Sur.

            

For the Cordillera, Fianza asked that a regional office be established in Baguio and a district set up in other parts of the region. He noted it would be practical to have an office in the city as Baguio serves many patients from other parts of Luzon, it being  the top medical center north of Metro-Manila.

A case in point, he pointed out, is the continuously increasing number of end-stage kidney failure patients from within and outside the Cordillera being served by the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center because of its open policy, the quality of its service and its lower rates.

As of last January, the number of kidney patients being treated twice or thrice-a-week at the BGHMC  was 169. By March, the figure increased to 179, a trend which is surely to continue.  

Despite their huge number, dialysis patients being served by the BGHMC used to avail of PCS0 support three to four times a year when the processing for applications was still centralized at its office in Quezon City.

At the Urdaneta office, the quota for kidney patients coming from the BGHMC was initially three per week. Acting on the clamor of patients, the quota was increased to four a week. If not increased, BGHMC patients would be able to avail of PCSO support only once a year.

            

Fianza’s resolution will be transmitted to PCSO chair Margarita Juico and the PCSO board of directors for their appropriate action, with copies furnished President Aquino and Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman.

            

Likewise, the resolution will be transmitted to the regional government of the Autonomous Region in Mindanao, with the request for it to adopt a similar resolution.

City mayor Mauricio Domogan also recently wrote PCSO chair Juico to air the plight of patients from within and outside the Cordillera because of the reduced  medical support from the government’s humanitarian arm  as a result of its decentralized operations.

Readers of this paper who  have connections to top national government agencies or get the chance to talk to senatorial candidates in the May polls, are urged to ask them to help lobby for the opening of regional and district offices of the PCSO here and in the Autonomous Region of Mindanao.

Likewise, local government units in the Cordillera can follow suit with similar resolutions.