Opposition Sen. Leila de Lima on Thursday slammed the Department of Health (DoH) for continuously turning a blind eye on the plight and the needs of medical frontliners in the country.
De Lima said that despite Palace officials repeated lauding of doctors, nurses, and other medical staff who sacrificed life, time, and effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, it cannot hide the “reeking stench of squalor and failure” to provide adequate support and equipment to these frontliners.
“Our health sector is on the verge of collapse…Just recently, nurses of San Lazaro Hospital (SLH) exposed to the public their pitiful state – how they are treated as robots and not human beings,” De Lima said.
“This is not an isolated case. My office has received information that frontliners of Jose Reyes Memorial Medical Center are likewise made to endure sorry conditions. And yet these workers in sweat-soaked PPEs still show up – day in and day out, and holding on despite the fatigue, the lack of adequate government support and absence of prioritization,” she stressed.
“However, they, who we laud as heroes, are now crying foul. The worst part of it all is the fact that these big hospitals are within an arm’s reach of the Department of Health, and yet, the very Department which is to stir this nation to survival, has either numb senses to realize the crisis that is happening within its very backyard, or has actually just opted to turn a blind eye,” De Lima lamented.
De Lima said the way the DoH is dealing with the pandemic “is simply out of touch” that it took big private hospitals such as Makati Medical Center and St. Luke’s Medical Center to speak up.
Their pronouncements, she noted, have led the DoH to finally admit that the country’s critical care capacity has hit “danger zone.”
“But true to this administration’s manifest benightedness to the struggles of health workers in government hospitals, DoH said that they are now preparing government hospitals to adjust the number of beds because ‘we have to be ready for this because we are in a crisis’,” she stressed.
However, De Lima said she doubts the DoH can deliver on its promise, noting the government’s propensity to use frontliners into pawns and desert them in the end.
“For instance, what is the sense of a 30 percent bed capacity for COVID-19 patients when hospital staff are either quitting, being quarantined, are themselves weakened by exhaustion, and worse, dying?” she said.
“Instead of boasting about the number of beds available, why don’t you get out from the safety of your offices to the ground, so you can finally see the real picture. How, despite millions in spending, our medical frontliners are purchasing their own PPEs because supplies are simply running out,” she told the DoH.
De Lima further said that despite presidential spokesman Harry Roque’s statement saying the country was able to “beat” UP’s prediction, the country’s medical frontliners are overwhelmed, overworked, underpaid, and simply not given the protection that they deserve.
“Even before we hit the projected 100,000 cases by August, our health system is already crumbling,” she pointed out.
“Lauding them, and clapping for them, is not enough…tama na ang pag-papaasa, (Stop giving them false hopes)” she stressed.