The Department of Health (DOH) said it will look into the different concerns about the distribution of benefits for the country's healthcare workers.
“Part of our priorities, and as instructed by the President, that we look into these issues that have been hounding the benefits of the healthcare workers,” said DOH Officer-in-Charge Maria Rosario Vergeire during a television interview on Friday, July 15.
“We are planning to start discussing these with the healthcare workers and of course looking at our implementing units, looking at the challenges, and how we can be able to address this to facilitate the release of the benefits,” she added.
Vergeire assured that the government has enough funds for the benefits of health workers and they “have already downloaded” the funds to agency’s regional offices or Centers for Health Development.
“The issues would really be transactional compliance to requirements. Some would be that there would be this non-signing of the memorandum of agreement if it’s a private hospital, the liquidation of the previous funds that were given to them,” said Vergeire.
Vergeire reiterated that health facilities need to comply in completing the necessary documents in order to get the benefits for their respective health workers.
“We have to do that because we are in government and we have to follow the rules and regulations set forth for these auditing rules. So ito yung mga minor things that we need to just facilitate,” she said.
“I think some of them are not understanding that the head of their facilities have to comply with the requirements so that we can be able to release the funds to them,” she added.
Fraudulent text messages
In a related development, the DOH Metro Manila Center for Health Development (MMCHD) warned the public, particularly the health workers, against a circulating text message about the claim status of their One Covid-19 Allowance (OCA).
The DOH-MMCHD said that the text message is encouraging the public to send a message at a certain email address.
“Ang naturang text message ay hindi mula sa ahensya. Ang pagkuha ng OCA ay diretsong pinagbibigay alam sa makakatanggap na may kumpleto at maayos na dokumento (To obtain the OCA, the recipient, who have a complete and proper documents, will be directly notified),” it said in an advisory.
“Inaabisuhan rin ng DOH ang publiko na siguraduhing lehitimo ang mga nakakalap na balita (The DOH advises the public to ensure that any information they will gather is legitimate),” it added.