Gwen on ‘rightsizing’ hospital staffing: We are just following DOH standards

Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia | CDN Digital file photo

CEBU CITY, Philippines —The Capitol’s move to “rightsize” the number of personnel in provincial and district hospitals since the start of the new administration has drawn flak from netizens as posts circulated online claiming that hospitals were unable to attend to patients due to understaffing.

But Governor Gwendolyn Garcia has maintained that the number of personnel now detailed in the hospitals are in adherence to the standards set by the Department of Health (DOH).

The provincial government, through the Provincial Health Office (PHO), is running 4 provincial and 16 district hospitals across the province. The district hospitals are either 10-bed, 25-bed, or 50-bed facilities while provincial hospitals are at a 100-bed capacity.

Medical facility capacity

Garcia explained that depending on the capacity of the medical facility, the DOH had set the number of personnel needed to run it.

According to Garcia, the province-run hospitals have gone beyond the staffing that they were supposed to have.

For a 10-bed hospital like the Pinamungajan District Hospital, the DOH standards only allocates a team of three doctors. Previous staffing in the facility, however, employed one permanent doctor and 6 others on a contract of service setup.

A provincial hospital, meanwhile, has an allocation of 30 doctors, 63 nurses and 44 administrative personnel.

But based on the records presented by Garcia, the provincial hospital like the one in Bogo City employed 37 doctors in a contract of service set up, 62 nurses on job order employment and 51 job order hospital administration personnel.

“We cannot expect a 10-bed hospital to have the same staffing pattern to that of a 25-bed hospital more so to that of a 100-bed hospital,” Garcia said.

No excuse

Garcia said that the number of patients exceeding the bed capacity of a hospital would not be an excuse to increase the staffing of a hospital.

“It does not give the justification nga atong butangan og puno nga mga doctor nga mura na nig mo-function as a provincial hospital,” Garcia said.

(It does not justify the idea of adding more doctors (to a district hospital) because the hospital would now function like a provincial hospital.)

Read more: Garcia, Davide back improvement of provincial, district hospitals to decongest VSMMC

The governor said that they might restudy whether the hospitals need to be subjected for reaccreditation with the DOH to upgrade them to a higher- capacity medical facility.

Garcia also said that the number of personnel retained in the province-run hospitals were also based on the recommendations from their respective chiefs of hospital.

She said that moving forward, the chiefs of hospitals should be responsible for maximizing their allocated manpower complement and make sure that they would be able to deliver the needed services./dbs