The chairperson of the House of Representatives' Committee on Health is seeking to modernize the country’s preparedness to address public health emergencies by creating a specialized agency that will handle communicable diseases.
Quezon Rep. Angelina Tan, the panel head, filed House Bill 6633 that proposes the creation of the Public Health Emergency Services Modernization Program which shall "undertake necessary reforms in the recruitment, training, employment and management of the country’s public health emergency personnel; acquisition and upgrading of appropriate technologies, laboratories, and equipment; and provision for the needed relocation, improvement, and construction of facilities to enhance the country’s preparedness and response to public health emergencies."
“The Philippine health system, just like the great majority of national health systems in the world today, is obviously ill prepared to address the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic. We are stumbling to handle the large influx of COVID-19 patients and we will continue to do so with future respiratory pathogen infections unless we do something now to upgrade our capability to face major public health emergencies like this pandemic," Tan said.
Tan said modernizing the country’s capabilities for public health emergency preparedness and strengthen the current bureaucracy is needed to address communicable diseases in the country through organizational and institutional reforms.
“To better prepare against public health emergencies, we need to embark on two essential initiatives: health modernization and institutional reforms. We cannot merely keep on rearranging the boxes within our health organization without capacitating our health personnel and resources. That will not work. We need to modernize and reorganize our health system to protect the public from health risks, Tan explained.
House Bill 6633 proposes the creation of the Public Health Emergency Services Modernization Program which will undertake necessary reforms in the recruitment, training, employment and management of the country’s public health emergency personnel; acquisition and upgrading of appropriate technologies, laboratories, and equipment; and provision for the needed relocation, improvement, and construction of facilities to enhance the country’s preparedness and response to public health emergencies.
According to Tan, part of the Public Health Emergency Services Modernization Program
is the establishment of a Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDPC), which will serve as the principal agency mandated to develop and apply communicable disease prevention and control initiatives.
"This move essentially removes the function of addressing the communicable disease concerns from the Department of Health and transfers the same to the CDPC, which will absorb the existing Disease Prevention and Control Bureau, the Epidemiology Bureau, the Disease Emergency Management Bureau, and the Bureau of Quarantine of the Department of Health, including the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. The CDPC will be attached to the DOH for policy, planning and program coordination. In doing so, the country will be able to provide a specialized agency for addressing communicable diseases," Tan said.
The bill further provides for the upgrading of the authorized bed capacity of the RITM to one hundred (100) beds where one-half of its bed capacity will be used as negative pressure isolation rooms. It also seeks to establish RITM branches in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
Following Taiwan’s model, considered to be among the best globally in COVID-19 response, the measure seeks to establish a Public Health Emergency Command Center which will serve as a physical location or virtual space where designated public health emergency management personnel assemble to coordinate operational information and resources for strategic management of public health events and emergencies.