Some guardians of patients at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center sleep on the sidewalk as they wait for the next day to attend to their kin at the hospital. | Photo courtesy of Councilor Jose Lorenzo Abellanosa
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City Council has called for its Committee on Health, Hospital Services, and Sanitation to provide a waiting area for persons accompanying patients at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC).
The council, during its regular session on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, passed the proposed resolution of Councilor Jose Lorenzo Abellanosa who said that there was a “compelling need” to provide the accompanying individuals of the VSMMC patients a waiting area where they could stay while the patients were recovering in the hospital.
“The unsanitary and inconvenient conditions in the streets where the accompanying persons usually stay while waiting for the patients and the interactions they have with the patients in the hospital pose a serious risk of transmission of diseases, including COVID-19,” the councilor said in his resolution.
Abellanosa also said that the construction of a waiting facility or the allocation of a waiting area in the hospital or even in another building for these individuals to stay while waiting could serve as a model for all the other public hospitals once constructed.
Meanwhile, the Department of Social Welfare and Services (DSWS)-Cebu City, earlier, said that the shelter beside the city’s Normal Oasis for Adaptation and a Home (NOAH) complex, which was intended for street dwellers to spend the night, can also temporarily accommodate the families or guardians of those patients at the VSMMC who cannot afford to rent a place here in the city.
DSWS-Cebu City officer-in-charge Dr. Ester Concha also said that the city government deploys buses every night to pick up and transport homeless people and others who need safe space to spend the night to the temporary shelter.
She said same bus would take them back to the city streets at 5 a.m. the next day so that they could carry on with their usual business and would have their livelihood.
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