The recent acquisition of advanced diagnostic equipment and critical care facilities at the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH) is helping ensure that even indigent Filipinos can have free access to high-quality healthcare at the country’s largest tertiary hospital.
The hospital recently inaugurated a combined imaging capability in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT)—better known as PET-CT scan equipment—for more comprehensive diagnostics. In addition, a new centralized intensive care unit is now capable of accommodating 32 patients at a time and a 128-slice CT scan. All of these developments from part of UP-PGH’s long-term masterplan.
UP-PGH Director Dr. Gerardo Legaspi acknowledged the long four-year wait for the first-ever PET-CT scan facility to be procured by the Philippine government. “But now that it’s here, we have leveled the field for poor patients, who will be using this machine 80 percent of the time versus 20 percent for paying patients,” Legaspi said, adding that the PET-CT scan procedure can accommodate up to eight patients a day at present and will be scaled up to 15 once operations become more regular.
PGH is coordinating with the Department of Health (DOH) on how to make this service available to non-PGH patients. DOH personnel will also be trained on its use alongside doctors under the UP-PGH residency program, Legaspi said. He added that the facility will be operated in collaboration with specialists and experts from other hospitals.
Also in the growing list of UP-PGH interventions are those for breast cancer patients who can have a tumor removed followed by a one-time radiation treatment through intraoperative radiotherapy or IORT, foregoing the need for the usual 10 to 20 days of radiation therapy.
Additionally, the neurosurgeons of PGH are implanting deep brain stimulation devices on patients suffering from the rare Lubag disease or X-linked dystonia parkinsonism (XDP) that occurs almost exclusively on males from Panay Island, and perform high frequency focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatment for tremors related to parkinsonism as an additional option for Lubag patients.
The HIFU for brain intervention is only found in UP-PGH in the country and only the second in Southeast Asia. The hospital also has a transcranial magnetic stimulation unit, which sends electromagnetic waves to the brain for faster healing of patients with depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and addiction. Recently PGH installed a robotic gait trainer machine in its rehabilitation medicine department to further improve the capability of disabled patients to recover their functions.
Legaspi said the new equipment allowed UP-PGH to do medical procedures that were otherwise expensive to obtain from private hospitals or may not even be available in most of them.
