DOH studying augmentation of health workforce amid COVID-19 surge

The Department of Health (DOH) is studying how it can augment the health workforce amid a fresh surge in coronavirus infections, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said Monday.

Vergeire said some hospitals are struggling with a reduced workforce after health workers fell ill with COVID-19, went on leave, or resigned from work.

“The DOH is looking into how it can provide health human resource augmentation to hospitals,” she said in Filipino during a briefing.

Vergeire said that when the country was experiencing a surge last year, the DOH “asked help from other regions who were not so much affected” by COVID-19 and also hired more health workers.

The department’s move to transfer health workers from other regions to COVID-19 hotspots, however, had been met with strong opposition from doctors who stressed that they needed to keep serving their rural communities. 

Meanwhile, Vergeire urged hospitals to allocate more beds for COVID-19 cases.

“Sometimes, a hospital may just allocate 10 beds for COVID. When those 10 beds are already exhausted, they’re immediately at 100% [occupancy],” she said.

“I urge all hospitals, both public and private: The national and local government, we have a law that during surge in cases, they need to help the government in expanding their beds to accommodate more patients,” she added.

Private hospitals earlier stressed that they cannot simply increase their COVID-19 bed allocation without also increasing the health worker complement. 

“These problems with health human resources, we understand them and that is a fact. Even in July and August, we were not able to expand immediately because of the health human resource problem,” Vergeire said.

“That’s why we’re discussing the health worker augmentation and how we can find ways to deploy more personnel.”

The Philippines logged 7,757 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday afternoon, marking the third straight day with over 7,000 new infections and bringing the national tally to 663,794 cases with 577,754 recoveries and 12,968 deaths. — RSJ, GMA News