Billionaire Ramon S. Ang, President and Chief Operating Officer San Miguel Corporation (SMC) is looking to build a state-of-the-art hospital that will focus on research on infectious diseases.
To be built on a 3-5 hectare property in the southern part of Luzon, the hospital will be the newly-established RSA Foundation’s first project and foray into helping future-proof society post-pandemic.
The facility is envisioned to help arm and better prepare the country’s health care system to deal with health crises and other local and global outliers.
The health facility, which will specialize in research on infectious diseases and providing care for ambulatory patients, will be sustainably-designed to operate efficiently during a crisis.
“This pandemic has been an eye-opener for all of us. Our health care system needs to be strengthened. For this reason, we want to help build up our country’s capability to handle future pandemics and other health crises,” Ang said.
He added that, “We envision this hospital to be resilient and adaptable. It will operate efficiently, improve health services, and make health care more accessible and affordable to a greater number of Filipinos.”
Ang said that the facility will focus on treating ambulatory or outpatients so that it can treat more patients from vulnerable or disadvantaged communities for sicknesses that typically won’t require hospitalization.
The hospital, he added, would also be home to a research facility that will provide support for government on public health concerns, specifically, infectious diseases.
Over the last six months, since the enhanced community quarantine was declared, Ang steered SMC to be a leading private sector partner in the country’s COVID-19 response.
It allotted P500 million out of its over P13 billion COVID-19 response package for donations to government and public and private hospitals various medical-grade personal protective gear and life-saving, capacity-building medical equipment.
Its donations of RT-PCR testing machines, fully automated RNA extraction machines, and PCR test kits alone, raised the country’s total testing capacity by 15,000 tests per day.
It is also the first major Philippine company to put up its own purpose-built RT-PCR testing laboratory and commit to testing its entire workforce—some 70,000 strong, composed of employees, partners, consultants, and third-party providers.
The planned hospital is part of Ang’s and SMC’s commitment to help revive the economy through crucial infrastructure projects that can immediately create jobs, stimulate economic activity, and in the long-term pave the way for an inclusive post-pandemic economic recovery.