The Philippine Health System and Health Outcomes in the Country

The Philippine Health System and Health Outcomes in the Country

        The Philippines healthcare sector’s mission is “to create a sustainable, high quality and cost efficient healthcare system that is accessed by Filipinos.” At present, the Aquino administration has committed itself to achieving better health outcomes in terms of the Millenium Development Goals; moreover, they are pushing for universal health care or Kalusugan Pangkalahatan (KP). Their approach to improving health outcomes has involved health financing, service delivery, policy, standards and regulation, governance, human resources and health information.

Achieving this mission is still a great endeavor since there are even greater disparities in socio-economic class and geographic divisions. Unfortunately, the Philippines lags behind in life expectancy at birth, under 5 mortality rate and births attended by skilled health personnel against other Southeast Asian countries (See Figure 1). The health system must be able to address “the top five causes of death include heart and cerebrovascular diseases, malignant neoplasm, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. The top five causes of morbidity include acute respiratory infection, ALRTI and pneumonia, bronchitis, hypertension and acute watery diarrhoea.” (“Health Service Delivery Profile Philippines”, 2012)

[pic 1]

Health Sector Reform, the Private Sector’s Role and Low Impact of Health Reform

Like other countries, the Philippines has various laws and policies that have been passed to manage and control the practice of medical professionals. These include laws and policies to protect patients and ensure that practitioners provide more efficient, sustainable and high quality service delivery for patients. Patients are protected from the outcome of malpractice and standardize the services to be given to patients (Anti-Medical Malpractice Act). These laws are to ensure that the patients receive quality care. Among these policies, also, are policies that encourage specialized practitioners to hers. However, many necessary costs like clinic space, equipment, and human resources are also shouldered by the individual.One of these is work in government hospitals while still allowing them to practice in their private clinics as per Administrative Order no. 92, series of 2003.

This policy was to encourage practitioners to reach out to the more indigent groups of people, to put simply, improve access to quality health care. This however, has not been as effective as can be observed with most doctors who are still concentrated within the most urban cities in the country, at private hospitals nonetheless. Doctors still opt to work in private institutions or go on their own in private practice (though more often than not, private practice as was mentioned is only feasible for well-known doctors) for the sake of better income and sometimes, although rarely, into group practice