The Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) stands in solidarity with our nurse-colleagues who were fired from their jobs at the Taguig-Pateros District Hospital (TPDH) for expressing their opinion on the grave state of that hospital’s healthcare delivery system. What happened to them reflects the collective injustice that nurses are made to suffer. Massive unemployment has brought about the monster that is contractualization, which feeds on the desperation of many from among our ranks to find a job.
Instead of improving our healthcare delivery system by building more hospitals and hiring more tenured health workers, the Aquino administration has chosen to strengthen contractualization by pushing for the privatization and corporatization of major government-run hospitals and medical centers nationwide. It stripped these hospitals of much-needed funds for maintenance and operations, personal services and capital outlay. Because of this, hospitals are forced to hire “job order nurses” to augment their workforce. Also, the RN Heals program, which President Aquino raved about in his last State of the Nation Address, is nothing but another sugar-coated contractualization scheme where underpaid nurses will be terminated after a year of service.
Contractualization is evil. It denies health professionals their dignity as tenured employees and their constitutional right to organize and mobilize (even online), to redress their just grievances. It treats workers as dispensable cheap labor. We must never allow this form of modern-day slavery to continue.
We salute these brave nurses and the volunteer-doctor for exposing the dismal conditions of our hospitals. In a country where seven out of 10 ill Filipinos die without any medical attention, it is our moral obligation as health workers to speak up and to criticize policies that hinder health care delivery and access to health for the poor. We urge our colleagues in the healthcare profession to follow suit and support the fight of our brothers and sisters in Taguig-Pateros and everywhere.—JOSSEL I. EBESATE, RN, president, Alliance of Health Workers, ahwphil@yahoo.com