The Department of Health (DOH-6) will be sending doctors from Western Visayas to Cebu City, an emerging coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) “hotspot”.
Based on a letter addressed to DOH Undersecretary Abdullah Dumama Jr., a total of 40 doctors under the government’s Doctors to the Barrios (DTTB) program will be temporarily transferred to hospitals in Cebu City.
The deployment is set to start tomorrow, June 30 until Sept. 5, 2020, said DOH-6 Regional Director Marlyn Convocar.
The 40 will be deployed in four batches. Each batch is composed of 10 doctors mostly from Iloilo.
The move was opposed by DTTB Batches 36 (Alab) and 37 (Mandala) and the Iloilo Association of Municipal Health Officers, Inc (IAMHOI).
In their joint position paper, DTTB Batches 36 and 37 called on the DOH-6 to “desist the abrupt exploitative order.”
Alab and Mandala said the “involved doctors were not suitably informed through writing” and “no proper consultation with the stakeholders was done prior to [the issuance of the] directive.”
They also lamented the lack of “detailed guidelines and protocols to protect the doctors in [the] temporary reassignment.”
According to them, the directive “contradicts the thrust of the DTTB program.”
In its official statement, IAMHOI said “transferring the currently deployed DTTBs is not the right approach to address the problem [in] Cebu.”
“The different municipalities of the province of Iloilo are also responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and currently doing their efforts to prevent the spread in the communities,” it said.
“The DTTBs who are to be pulled out and re-assigned are already essential part of the public health system responding to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in their respective municipalities,” the association added.
Cebu City recorded 4,539 COVID-19 cases, including 100 deaths and 2,242 recoveries, as of June 25.IMT
