‘We are hopeful and keeping our fingers crossed for this much-needed compassionate novel health care outreach project, a partnership among private/public/government sectors, to come to fruition and start to serve those underserved, marginalized kababayan of ours.’
DR. Eustaquio (Boy) Abay, a retired Mayo-trained Fil-Am neurosurgeon in Wichita, Kansas, together with Philippine Secretary of Health Teodoro Javier Herbosa, other medical and civic leaders in the Philippines, and our group in the United States, are coming up with a rural health outreach program that will provide healthcare access for underserved people in remote municipalities in the Philippines, especially to those marginalized, suffering in the gutter of poverty. The primary challenge is equitable access to healthcare, in addition to the burden of certain diseases.
Dr. Abay, who is spearheading this new movement, is chairman of the Filipino American Initiative to Transform our Homeland (FAITH), a subsidiary of the Filipino United Network-USA (FUN8888.com), affiliated with Gawad Kalinga, through the efforts of Dr. Abay.
Our initial Zoom meeting (Manila-USA) was held on July 1, 2025, and another is scheduled for July 24, 2025. The plan is to have a sustainable program for a more equitable healthcare access, to supplement the Universal Health Care (UHC) system, signed into law on February 20, 2019, as Republic Act 11223, with the following key components: PhilHealth, national healthcare insurance for all citizens, and the Department of Health, which will spearhead the national healthcare policies and program.
Those who attended the July 1st Zoom meeting were Secretary Herbosa, Boy Abay, Ernie Ordonez, retired Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Dr. Ramon Paterno III and Dr. Buenaventura of the DOH, Juan M. Montero, President of the Montero Medical Mission, Domingo Alvear, President of the World Surgical Foundation), Ed Barcelona, Chairman, COPP-SPSA Surgical Outreach Program; and yours truly, Chairman of the Council of Past Presidents of the Society of Philippine Surgeons in America (COPP-SPSA), a 501(c)3 Humanitarian Foundation in the United States.
In the Philippines, “about 75 percent of cities and municipalities have an insufficient number of healthcare workers,” according to the Philippine Institute of Development Studies. The DOH reported “38.46 of 6th-class municipalities do not have doctors.” Around 40 percent of Filipinos live in rural areas, but only 10 percent of healthcare workers serve these forsaken areas; the 90 percent practice in the urban areas for obvious financial advantage. They, too, have families to support. The situation is most unfortunate. Indeed, poverty sucks!
For more than half a century, since the 1960s, Filipino physicians at home and abroad have been doing medical missions to rural areas in the Philippines to help address this sad state of healthcare for the poor. Well-intentioned, these humanitarian projects are inadequate, hampered by life’s realities and insurmountable logistical problems.
These missionaries take off from their medical practice for about 2-4 weeks, pay for their own airfare from the United States, Canada, etc., purchase medications and equipment to use in their mission, spend on their local transportation, food, and hotel stay in the Philippines, once or twice a year. The average expense for each missionary is around $3,000, or around $5,000 if accompanied by a spouse, which is the usual case. Always longing for Philippine-style Christmas, most of these medical missions are held in December. This allows the missionary physicians to also visit with their relatives and friends in the provinces.
Part of the realities of this humanitarian venture is the risk of air flights, local security, and the potential health risk of getting infections, like COVID-19, tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria, dengue, trichinosis, and other parasite infections. I have surgical colleagues who were hospitalized for some of these conditions while we were on our tandem missions in two separate rural areas.
As chairman of the COPP-SPSA, yours truly, together with Doctors Hernan M. Reyes, Bayani Ignacio (Canada), Ed Barcelona (chairman of our COPP-SPSA medical mission), Rolly Mendiola, the late Daniel C. Fabito (Executive Director) and Juan Montero, have been coordinating with the Philippine College of Surgeons in Quezon City (thru Dr. Beda Espineda) to provide a surgeon and an anesthesiologist in rural towns where there are none (funded by the COPP-SPSA) for three months at a time. The COPP-SPSA also did its medical-surgical missions.
However, these missions in general are scattered, uncoordinated, disorganized, and not comprehensive as a single program should be. Various Fil-Am, Canadian-Filipinos, and other groups of physicians around the world put together their “own mission in the towns they choose, usually their home towns, many times serving the same town each year,” missing many other “more deserving rural areas.” And 2-4 weeks of healthcare access is only a band-aid solution. They are also not sustainable since most of the physician missionaries abroad are in their 70s and 80s, a vanishing breed of expatriates.
Universal Health Care, alone and in itself, will not be able to fully address the dilemma of inequity access to medical care in the Philippines. This is where this new plan, inspired and fully supported by Secretary Herbosa, comes in. This new rural outreach partnership will replace the soon-expiring, evanescent medical missions from abroad, which might last for another five to ten years, maximum, since there are no more physicians allowed to enter the United States.
I have suggested to Secretary Herbosa to consider making it mandatory for new graduates of various residency training to spend a year of service (private practice, paid through the UHC) in a town with no physicians or surgeons. They will be assigned to DOH-chosen municipalities in need, and replaced each year after their one-year stint. This could cover about 6,000 underserved towns with uninterrupted healthcare each year.
We are hopeful and keeping our fingers crossed for this much-needed compassionate novel health care outreach project, a partnership among private/public/government sectors, to come to fruition and start to serve those underserved, marginalized kababayan of ours.
May God bless the Philippines!
