By IBARRA C. MATEO
HEALTH Secretary Enrique T. Ona on Sunday assured Filipinos and international organizations funding various health-related projects in the country such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that the Department of Health is not engaged in the illegal practice of “fund conversion” despite the department’s budgetary problems.
“The Department of Health does not have ghost employees, ghost projects, intelligence or discretionary funds to convert,” he said in a statement refuting reports that the DOH is among the government agencies involved in “fund conversion.”
Fund conversion, a practice associated with the military, refers to the fraudulent use of government money for purposes other than what they were allocated for. Budgets for salaries and allowances of personnel are among those that are “converted” because disbursements are difficult to monitor.
But Ona said, “Every single peso allotted to and every foreign currency donated to the Health Department properly goes to where it was originally intended, and then properly liquidated and accounted for.”
The health secretary also said he has set up an ad hoc committee to study the human resources requirement of the health sector “as a further concrete measure” to improve and facilitate health care delivery to all Filipinos.
“The findings and recommendations of the ad hoc committee will guide the crafting of the 2012 DOH budget up to 2015 and at the same time determine actual number of needed health professionals and health-related personnel in various government health facilities all over the country,” he said.
The DOH, which has 35,000 employees nationwide, has been allotted a total of P31.8 billion this year: P7.7 billion for personnel services, P15.1 billion for maintenance and other operating expenses and P8.9 billion for capital outlay. Its 2010 budget stood at P24.65 billion.
For the Philippine health sector, the years leading to 2015 are critical in meeting the country’s commitments to the UN Millennium Development declaration targeting to drastically reduce incidence of poverty, hunger and ill-health.
The National Demographic and Health Survey said about 80,000 children under age 5 die annually—one of three is in urban communities—due to common but preventable and treatable conditions such as vaccine preventable diseases, pneumonia and neonatal disorders. Malnutrition is partly to blame.
Every year, about 40,000 newborns die, again mostly from preventable causes, with majority of them dying within the first week.
The Philippine Nurses Association and other health professionals have repeatedly urged the DOH to address the longstanding problem of the nurse-to-patients ratio—one to 10—in most government hospital wards to improve delivery of health care. The ideal ratio in hospital wards is one nurse to eight to 10 patients.
Aside from budgetary constraints, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to increasing the number of health professionals in almost all government hospitals to meet the 21st century public health demands is the charter that governs these public health institutions established in the early 1900s or immediately after World War II.
A charter of a public health institution limits the number of health professionals, for example doctors and nurses, it can hire despite the significant increase in the number of Filipinos using the public health system since the time these government hospitals were established.