BAGUIO CITY – Government and private media practitioners here banded together to goad a region-wide signature campaign to rally the public in urging the government to provide free dialysis treatment for all kidney patients undergoing the blood-cleansing procedure.
The regional office of the Philippine Information Agency headed by regional director Helen Tibaldo and the Baguio Correspondents and Broadcasters Club (BCBC) under veteran newsman Ramon Dacawi will launch the signature drive via a “Kapihan” program set on January 17 at 9:30 a.m. at the PIA-CAR office.
“We decided to launch this campaign given the fact that news of dialysis patients giving up hope — and on life – is becoming the ‘normal’ thing to do for patients who have exhausted their resources in attempting to sustain this life-time medical procedure for them to live,” Tibaldo and Dacawi said.
Through the campaign, media practitioners are “optimistic that we will be able to convince our health and political leaders to come up with a free dialysis medical policy that would relieve patients and their families of the continuing financial burden they have to bear for their ailing kin to survive.”
PIA provincial offices and print and broadcast media practitioners in all Cordillera provinces will support their Baguio counterparts by mounting their own signature campaigns in their areas of jurisdiction.
As part of the campaign, the mediamen will also rally government officials in the provincial, city, municipal and barangay levels to approve resolutions requesting the Office of the President, the Senate and House of Representatives, the Department of Health, Philhealth and other national government agencies to pool their resources and come up with a unified Free Dialysis Health Program for the whole country.
The BCBC broached the drive as the group’s way of providing “substance to the coming new year” through a resolution adopted during the club’s meeting held last Dec. 17 at Luisa’s Café.
It was meant to address the plight of the dialysis patients, majority of whom are still hard-up in sustaining their dialysis needs despite the 90 sessions-a-year fund support from Phihealth.
“The 90-sessions-per-year Philhealth support is far from enough as a patient undergoing three-times-a-week hemodialysis has to have 156 session a year, or 66 sessions more (are need to complete a year-long requirement),” the BCBC resolution noted.
The assistance is also whittled down when a patient has to undergo medical confinement which is equivalent to the cost of one session per day of hospitalization.
“This arrangement is discouraging (patients) from undergoing confinement even if they need to be hospitalized for fear that Philhealth support for their dialysis would be used up by their stay in the hospital.”
Some patients who have used up their quota and failed to access support from other agencies end up “at a loss with some having no choice but to forego one, two or three dialysis sessions, in the process suffering from congestion, with some deciding to forego dialysis for good, waiting for death to end the financial suffering of their families.”
Himself a dialysis patient, Dacawi cited the case of his fellow patient, a mother who died last month shortly after voluntarily foregoing treatment to relieve her family of the burden of finding resources for her remaining treatments months before the Philheath assistance can be renewed.
As it is the family is also saddled with the medical needs of her two daughters, one diagnosed of leukemia and the other of epilepsy.** Aileen P. Refuerzo
