MANILA (UCAN): In the Philippines, the Alliance of Health Workers, a union of nurses and medical practitioners, said that corruption in government had been rampant while it failed to release their benefits despite members working on the front line.
“Indeed, there is so much budget in the Department of Health and yet they always refuse to provide for health workers’ Covid-19 benefits, safety and protection,” the alliance’s president, Robert Mendoza, told the press on August 16.
“We remained greatly deprived of our just and timely Covid-19 benefits like the meal, transportation and accommodation allowance, special risk allowance and active hazard duty pay, among others,” Mendoza added.
The alliance said that if the government fails to increase their benefits, mass protests would be staged.
Filipino nurses get a monthly salary of about 15,000 pesos ($2,300) and doctors earn a monthly income of 33,500 pesos ($5,180), according to a 2018 report of the Philippines Statistics Authority. The average monthly national salary of health workers is 18,000 pesos ($2,780).
The Department of Health has already appealed against the resignation of nurses, who comprise 70 per cent of staff in Philippine hospitals.
Knowing the billions of pesos unspent and misused by the Department of Health is an insult to our nurses and doctors. They risk their lives in hospitals, leaving their loved ones, yet they do not receive the pay they deserve
Father Jun Garcia, Diocese of Jaro
Some groups, however, claimed that calls for resignation are not supported by all medical practitioners, but admitted that nurses could only hold the line for so long.
“It seems we do not have a choice anymore but to leave this dangerous job that does not pay us well. To make things worse, now we know there are funds but people up there [high-ranking government officials] would rather put them in their pockets than give them to us,” Jose Fabian, a member of a nurses’ union in a hospital in Manila, said.
Fabian said the mass resignation of nurses has been a phenomenon already for months.
“Actually, the mass resignation has been going on for the past five to seven months. About 40 per cent of nurses across the country have resigned,” Fabian said, quoting a report from a group of private hospitals in the Philippines.
Corruption in the Department of Health is unfair to the country’s health workers, said Father Jun Garcia of the Diocese of Jaro in Iloilo province, Western Visayas.
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“Knowing the billions of pesos unspent and misused by the Department of Health is an insult to our nurses and doctors. They risk their lives in hospitals, leaving their loved ones, yet they do not receive the pay they deserve,” Father Garcia said.
He said government officials should be “more conscious” of handling public funds, especially during a pandemic.
“They should think twice before spending the people’s money. It is not theirs. It is the people’s. Thus, funds should be spent for public need, not for corrupt reasons,” he said.
