With health being on top of people’s minds due to the raging COVID-19 pandemic, we are faced with the perplexity of how to go out of our homes to get the required health services such as diagnostic tests, vaccination, COVID testing, etc. When majority of us are home-bound, kept in isolation and grounded to our residences because of the quarantine declarations that seem to go on forever. Some of us somehow manage it because we have the transport means but what about our fellow Pinoys, particularly in the rural and urban depressed areas, whose difficulty is access to public transportation given all the restrictions and protocols that make riding a bus or jeepney too much of a hassle in terms of time, money and patience?
The answer is to put our health services or at least the necessary parts of it on the road to get to the houses, sitios, barangays, etc., of our countrymen. This undertaking need not overturn what the overall government effort has been doing against COVID-19 but a more focused and differential analysis of responding to the disease where people are suffering and are needing support. I speak on behalf of many of our citizens who may be falling between the cracks of the government’s pandemic response program and must be reached in order to fully state that our national response has been equitable and fair to all Filipinos.
Our hard-working Vice President Leni Robredo has been trying to shift our perspective away from the conventional approach to public medicine. That of which is your stationary hospitals and clinics and personnel just waiting for patients to enter their doors into a more flexible strategy that makes use of information technology, committed doctors, nurses and medical technologists as well as transportation or mobility to bring the caring and attention that many of our people need in the Era of Pandemics (as experts predict, COVID is just one of a possible series of virus challenges that we have to watch for). She recently urged local chief executives to put up mobile laboratories to give the public an option, as hospitals in the NCR Plus bubble remained full. “There are lots of patients who need X-ray, who need blood tests, for the doctor to know how they can be helped,” Robredo said. The Office of the Vice President is currently testing a mobile lab in Quezon City as part of the online teleconsultation program Bayanihan E-Konsulta. The mobile testing lab offers free COVID-19 test, X-ray and blood test to patients referred by their doctors from E-Konsulta.
VP Leni is a strong advocate of this new thinking on “medicine on wheels” as her Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) had been the first to launch a mobile COVID-19 testing initiative — a mobile swab testing facility mounted in a bus — last April 2021, in areas with reports of high COVID-19 transmissions. A component of this was Swab Cabs operating and testing individuals from communities around Metro Manila. The initial run was in Malabon City, in partnership with its local government, and Angat Buhay partners Kaya Natin Movement and UBE Express. And just this June, 2021, she also initiated the Vaccine Express together with the city government of Manila to set up a drive-thru vaccination for tricycle and pedicab drivers. A follow-up program was her partnership with the Quezon City government earlier this month to vaccinate transportation workers and operators. Outside Metro Manila, the Vaccine Express also extended its help to LGUs in Iriga City and Naga City in the Bicol Region. Under the partnership, the LGUs will provide the vaccines against the virus, while Robredo’s camp will focus on providing the manpower to facilitate the vaccination.
With the response and support that VP Leni’s efforts to provide our needy population with the medical help in the more accessible, more direct and more emphatic way possible thru medicine on wheels, the question arises as to when the national government may heed Robredo’s call for access to vaccine supply so as to make our pandemic response more equitable to all Filipinos?
On a personal note I would like to condole with a friend and colleague in the entertainment industry, Pablo A. Tariman on the death of his daughter, Kerima Lorena, in Negros Occidental last August 20, 2021. May Pablo find peace in her death and may Kerima rest in peace.