MY FATHER spent his final moments on a creaky old hospital bed. Acceptance was by no means easy, but I eventually came to terms with his passing. After all, he was already 76 years old then. He had silently been enduring his ailment for the past decade, and it was only best for him to find peace sooner than later.
Despite that, something else kept nagging my conscience.
About two months after Papa’s passing, I found myself in the very hospital that he was confined in. My cousin knew someone who had the chart I needed for an eye exam there. I grit my teeth. I wasn’t exactly fond of hospital visits—I was only there so I could secure my health clearance. As I walked towards my doctor’s clinic, I noticed rows of patients lined up along the hallways. I wasn’t passing by a wide path, nor were the patients separated into wards of any sort. They were just… there.
Some patients were lying on rusty beds with thin mattresses, while some were on bamboo ones. A few even rested on mattresses on the floor as family wearily fanned them, hoping to provide them even a sliver of added comfort. I held back from asking my cousin why the situation was so, but a part of me already had the answers that I wish weren’t true.
Hearing of hospitals exceeding capacity isn’t news here in the Philippines. A recent study shows that the country can only offer an average of one bed for every 1,000 people, and even less in some municipalities. This is magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, as more hospitals are forced to decline incoming patients due to overload.
It only gets worse as this goes with the fact that hospitals are either inaccessible or completely absent in many Philippine municipalities. This just solidifies that most Filipinos are not getting the kind of healthcare that we deserve.
Frankly, it’s not that the Philippines cannot provide state-of-the-art healthcare. It’s that this kind of service can usually be found only in private hospitals, and thus comes at a price too steep for most Filipinos.
Although the Universal Health Care Act was recently passed to alleviate medical expenses, I remain disturbed. Easing the financial burden of treatment is definitely a step in the right direction, but it wouldn’t mean much until people actually have enough hospitals within reach.
When we had to rush my father to the hospital, I remember that he spent a day on a bamboo bed outside a dedicated ward. Even then, we could only afford to place him into a semi-private ward. While we couldn’t send him in for private care, we could at least secure a spot for him in a public hospital.
I still think of those patients in the hallway to this day. I think of how one of them could be a father too, and how one of the kids I saw could be a pained daughter like I am. I think of how sickening it is that access to a basic human right is very much determined by how well-off you may be.
I think of them, and then I think of the patients who aren’t there because they can’t make it to the hospital at all.
