HEALTH Secretary Jean Paulyn Rosell-Ubial, fresh from a trip to the Caribbean island nation of Cuba, has disclosed Havana’s willingness for cooperation with Manila like bilateral exchanges of visits by medical practitioners.
According to Ubial, the central point of the efficient and effective health system in Cuba is actually the human resource compliment, noting there is one doctor for every 1,075 persons.
While the World Health Organization standard is that for public health, there should be one doctor for every 20,000 population, Ubial noted that in the Philippines setting, the standard is one doctor for every 33,000 population.
She told a recent Senate hearing the Cuban health system produces adequate numbers of health professionals, particularly doctors, such that their human resource to population ratio is more than the ideal ratio the WHO is actually promoting.
During her visit to Cuba, Ubial said the Cuban government, particularly the Minister of Health, indicated to her that they are willing to have capacity-building and exchanges in the future—cooperation like their doctors coming to the Philippines or Filipino doctors going there to learn from their system.
Ubial said, “Our health system or production of human resource is unlike that of Cuba. In the Cuban model, their school of medicine is under the Ministry of Health. So, they are able to produce medical graduates that are attuned to their health agenda.
“For us, we have only five state-owned colleges of medicine, and our production of doctors is not that many.”
She said even board exam passers for medicine in the Philippines is about 30 to 40 percent. In Cuba, she said, it’s 98 percent because they make sure the doctors they produce pass the board exam.
“But we also have to consider the quality of the healthcare professionals. But anyway, I think that’s also one of the strengths of the Cuban model, that they really make use of the health professionals that they graduate,” she said.
To cope up with the lack of doctors, Ubial said she already made a proposal to President Rodrigo Duterte to increase the number of doctors to be deployed in the government hospitals. “We are now doing a feasibility study about this,” she said.
She said the government needs to budget P57 billion to copy Cuba’s health program.
Ubial said, “I have asked my staff in the human resource unit to actually compute how much will it cost the Philippines if we adopt the Cuban model in health human resource.
“And if it’s a doctor at the frontline, or one doctor for every barangay, so that’s 2,000 to 5,000 population, that would cost us around P57 billion additional.
“But that’s only for the salary of the health worker. Now if it’s a midwife or a nurse that will be in the frontline per barangay that would be around P25 billion.”
At present, she said the government is offering scholarships to increase the number of students taking up medicine.
“For example, for geographically isolated disadvantaged areas, indigenous people are being encouraged to take up midwifery, nursing or medicine. So that we expect them to be the ones going to these hard-to-reach areas,” said Ubial.
She said they are also looking at the state universities and colleges to actually have some sort of arrangement of mandatory deployment before they can go to other specializations or other fields of practice.
Ubial also noted there has been collaboration and negotiations with the private sector physicians to actually service the rural areas.
“The idea is for them to adopt a hospital or a health facility. There is continuing effort of upgrading and capacity-building. That’s the mechanism that we are looking into. It’s not that they will transfer from private to government, but to actually support the government health facilities,” she said.
The health chief also emphasized that the Cuban health system is actually based on a principle of prioritization, it was given about 28 percent of the national budget to the health sector.
“And their per capita expenditure on health is US$460. The Philippine per capita expenditure on health based on the 2015 budget is US$76 dollars," she added.