Three members of the House of Representatives have proposed a bill creating a Medical Reserve Corps again to assist the country’s health system in times of public health emergencies.
Under House Bill (HB) No. 2 or the Act Instituting the Medical Reserve Corps and Appropriating Funds filed on Friday, July 1, it sought to establish the MRC under the Health Emergency Management Bureau of the Department of Health (DOH).
The proposed measure was lodged by Leyte 1st District Rep. Martin G. Romualdez and Tingog Partylist Reps. Yedda Marie Romualdez and Jude Acidre, but the copy of the bill was only released to the media on Monday, July 4.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the inability of the country’s health care system to cope with the surge of patients needing medical care due to lack of medically-trained personnel,” according to the measure’s explanatory note.
It also cited the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO), which showed there were six medical doctors per 10,000 Filipinos in 2017, a ratio lower than the WHO-recommended 10 physicians per 10,000 population.
The Philippines currently has a shortage of 290,000 health workers, which is aggravated by an annual migration of 13,000 health care professionals, the note stated.
“Against this backdrop, this bill aims to enhance the capacity of our country to produce and call on the needed manpower and expand its human health resources in times of disasters and public health emergencies of both national and local scale through the mobilization of a medical reserve force specifically trained to supplement the existing human health resources to ease the burden in our healthcare system,” it said.
This is not the first time that a House Bill on the MRC was filed after lawmakers passed an earlier measure on the third and final reading during the 18th Congress.
READ: Solon highlights importance of MRC bill as COVID persists
The HB No. 2 provides that the MRC “shall be organized, trained, developed, and maintained so as to ensure its readiness to immediately respond to the call to service.”
It mandates the Health department to maintain a registry of all medical reservists, including their addresses, contact numbers and similar information, and to issue MRC members identification cards.
The reserve corps may be mobilized to conduct contact-tracing and monitor suspected cases during disease outbreaks, help ensure quarantine measures, and provide logistics and manpower support for large-scale disaster and health emergency operations.
The President, upon recommendation of the DOH may mobilize the MRC to complement the military’s medical corps “in case of a declaration of a state of war, state of lawless violence or state of calamity.”