It is to the best interest of Cebu City residents especially the poor for City Hall to fast track completion of the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC) as soon as possible which is hopefully within the year or early next year.
Reports about the suspension of work in some parts of the city hospital which began months after the facility sustained heavy damage caused by the Oct. 15 earthquake had been a cause for concern especially owing to the incumbent administration’s previous position on the CCMC’s viability.
Former Cebu City mayor Michael Rama was correct when he pointed out that there were plans to privatize the CCMC and sell it to some major investors such as businessman Manny Pangilinan, who once visited the city hospital years back.
Try as he might, however, construction of the CCMC was a long and painful process as Rama had ambitious plans to convert the city hospital into a one-stop shop facility that will also reportedly house the city’s fire station and other emergency services units.
It also didn’t help that the architectural design for this ambitious reconstruction of the CCMC was unpaid by the city after some architects presented their concept to the former administration, only to come into a misunderstanding with them after being told that their services were expected to be offered for free.
Which is why there was a substantial downscaling of the proposed CCMC construction with the Department of Health (DOH) telling the city government to reduce the number of floors from 10 to five to ensure that the city hospital resumes full operations immediately.
Who doesn’t want a fully equipped, modern hospital facility for Cebu City? The problem of course was that expectations were different from hard reality. And the previous administration had no funds to finance construction of the city hospital despite the private “piso-piso” fund-raising campaign for this purpose.
Even if they wanted to, the incumbent administration is hard pressed to fully shut down work on the CCMC. They also showed no interest in changing the current contractor for the reconstruction project even if said contractor is supposedly 25 percent
behind schedule.
Still, the political opposition can put its money where their mouths are by lobbying for and pushing to authorize the mayor’s office to maybe contract another company that will expedite the completion of the scaled down CCMC.
Knowing them, however, they would probably content themselves with criticizing the administration so they can score brownie points with the city residents, who should have an operational city hospital in the soonest possible time.