A nurse dons her PPE on Christmas eve. | CDN DIGITAL FILE PHOTO
CEBU CITY, Philippines – To address the lack of healthcare workers attending to infected patients in hospitals, the government, and private sector has dangled financial incentives for nurses who will be deployed in COVID-19 wards.
The Project Balik Buhay (PBB), in a statement issued on Wednesday, July 28, announced that they launched the SalBaBida Program in which they will be providing P15,000 worth of monthly allowance to each nurse hired and assigned to take care of COVID-19 patients in some privately owned hospitals in Metro Cebu.
“The PBB SalBaBida Program will be donating a P15,000 per month additional monthly allowance to every nurse employed by the PBB Private Hospital Partner who is assigned to attend to Covid patients for the entire two-month period of August and September,” the press release read.
This meant that each nurse recruited and deployed to attend to COVID-19 patients in hospitals under PBB is expected to receive a total of P30,000 allowance.
“While our private hospitals in Cebu have devoted so much effort and resources to prepare as best they can, in terms of Covid bed capacities, medications and equipment, to be able to accommodate and attend to all Covid patients needing treatment, it is unfortunate that there still remains the gap of not having enough Nurses to man these facilities,” the group explained.
Nurses qualified to receive the cash incentives are those directly employed by PBB’s partner hospitals, ‘whether as full-time or project-based employees’.
“Interested licensed Nurse applicants may submit their applications directly to the Human Resource departments of all our enrolling PBB Private Hospital Partners,” they added.
Metro Cebu lately has been experiencing a steady increase of new COVID-19 patients, with experts sounding the alarms as hospitals here are ‘full to the brim’.
In response, the government started hiring more medical workers, particularly nurses, if it meant keeping hospitals afloat and able to respond to the influx of COVID-19 patients needing hospitalization.
Critical care utilization rate in Cebu City, where most hospitals are based, has already reached 55.1 percent as of July 24.
Critical care utilization rate is used to gauge the gravity of the outbreak in an area.
Rates below 60 percent are considered within ‘safe levels’ but if these go beyond 80 percent, it usually indicates that the healthcare system is starting to get overwhelmed. /rcg
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