The Philippine General Hospital (PGH) workers’ union on Monday slammed the proposed budget cut for the hospital in 2023.
Karen Faurillo, ALL UP Workers Union-Manila/PGH president, described the budget cutback as “unacceptable” and “worrying.”
“The first thing that will be affected by the UP budget cut is the service we give to patients,” Faurillo said in a broadcast interview.
Based on the government’s spending plan, the PGH’s proposed funding for next year will be slashed by P890 million, or from P6.3 billion to P5.4 billion.
Faurillo said as the country transitions to new normal, the PGH, the country’s biggest COVID-19 referral facility, instead needs more funding — at least P10-billion for 2023.
“We saw the need for PGH to be upgraded in terms of facilities, and in human resource,” she said.
The union, in a separate statement, said a budget increase would regularize more than 300 contractual and job order employees, upgrade Magna Carta benefits, and ensure safety and protection of PGH workers.
“A P10-billion budget would translate to better health services to patients and help ensure our health workers’ benefits and welfare,” the union said.
The group described the budget slash as “anti-poor” and “anti-health workers.”
“The union vowed to opposed and exhaust all means to fight against the budget reduction,” the statement stated.
The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has proposed a P2.5 billion budget cut for the entire University of the Philippines system, which runs the PGH.
The DBM said it was “wrong, in a way” to compare the 2023 National Expenditure Program (NEP) plan and this year’s national budget.
The UP budget for 2022 had “upward adjustments” due to “various capital outlay projects for infrastructure projects and purchase of hospital equipment for the PGH, which are one-time or non-recurring expenditures,” the DBM said in a statement last week.
The DBM added that it takes into consideration the budget utilization rate of any government institution prior to budget allocation in the proposed NEP.
“In our review and evaluation of UP’s budget proposals, we considered its absorptive capacity, which is 66 percent as of end-2021,” the budget department said.
It added that the education sector would “remain as being the highest budgetary priority of this administration as mandated by the Constitution,” with an 8.2 percent increase in the proposed 2023 budget to P852.8 billion.