OpinionsWhats up DocIt is in giving that we receive

It is in giving that we receive

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By DR. JONATHAN C. AMANTE

My sincere appreciation to the Outstanding Sillimanian Awards Committee to have come up with this year’s OSA.

Many people outside of Negros Oriental have always assumed all these years that Silliman University, being a prestigious institution of more than 100 years old, had a Medical School. But for all of us here in the Province, this remained just a dream until years of persistent work started in 1997.

Even that time, we were fraught with all sorts of challenges of establishing a medical school. Not a few projected it to be “very difficult” especially with the constant prompting from the administration that the University always required a balance between financial viability and quality of medical education.

Before we realized it, eight years had passed, our efforts began to bear fruit, emboldening us to plod on. The SU Medical School was eventually born, and the first batch of students who aspired to be medical doctors started in school year 2005-2006.

We were the 33rd Medical School in the country granted authority to train and produce medical practitioners.

Today, there are 48 medical schools around the country, and among all these, I am happy to announce that this 14-year-old SU Medical School is ranked No. 9 Top Performing Medical School in the country, based on the percentage of graduates who are able to hurdle the licensure exams.

I remember when I was just starting my clinical practice sometime in 1988 here in the Province, I spearheaded the first accredited residency program in Internal Medicine at the Silliman University Medical Center and at Holy Child Hospital.

I may not have perfectly planned it all out, but isn’t it just amazing that 70 percent of the pioneering faculty of the SU Medical School were products of that first-ever accredited residency program.

Subsequently, other medical experts with various other specialties joined our SU Medical School faculty who are not only highly-trained and rich in medical experience but who are more than willing to invest part of their clinical practice to teach the next generation of medical doctors.

In the last five years, the SU Medical School has trained and produced about 250 licensed physicians, half of whom have opted to stay and practice in Negros Oriental; the others go back to their home-countries or hometowns around the Philippines. We rejoice in the fruits of our labor.

I had always believed that the operation and management of a Medical School is the stimulus for the improvement of healthcare delivery.

Our earlier graduates since 2009 are now in different areas of practice, covering the community and hospital services. Basically, the Province’s community hospitals and district hospitals in Nabilog in Tayasan, Amio in Sta. Catalina, Dawis in Bayawan are serviced by doctors who were trained by the SU Medical School; they are the doctors who are now providing medical care at the Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital, in the Bayawan hospital, in Siquijor, as well as at the SU Medical Center and at Holy Child Hospital.

After completing their trainings both in community referral system and hospital practices, we have to ensure that these physicians have a place to practice — a situation that can no longer be accommodated in our present system.

One of the solutions to address this need was a providential opportunity for me, along with other medical doctors, to set up a new hospital system with state-of-the-art facilities. The vision for this new hospital is a venue for all our graduates from the SU Medical School to practice their field when they come back to the Province to serve. More importantly, the new hospital is something they can call their own.

These have been my advocacies in my journey as a medical practitioner: the creation of a residency training program, the establishment of a Medical School, and the management of a trail-blazing and avant-garde hospital in which medical school graduates can specialize in a career.

In retrospect, I may have missed out on so many other opportunities outside the Province and outside the country to the detriment of my personal gains but I’m happy because what have been completed and accomplished thus far were able to help both our patients and the doctors ultimately.

I leave the fruition of this dream and vision into the younger hands who are still in the sunrise of their lives, as you know we only pass this way once.

At this point, allow me to give thanks to my batch, BS General Science ‘77, that celebrated our 40th anniversary two years ago.

I am also grateful to the dedicated faculty and staff of the SU Medical School, and our active Medical students, who endorsed this nomination for this OSA.

My heartfelt gratitude goes to my parents who were my teachers in basic education, and who, to this day, continue to teach me life lessons, having been given the privilege to be their doctor. My mother is now 88 years old, and continues to serve as my inspiration. My father eventually succumbed to a lingering kidney disease after undergoing hemodialysis for about five years.

I am also very proud of my three sons — my trophies — all of whom graduated as medical doctors in the span of my 30 years of medical practice.

Best of all, I give honor and thanks to my wife, Dr. Pal Kadusale-Amante, who, all these years, has always been my most-valued critic whom I would first need to overcome before proceeding with my advocacies. Pal has veritably been a part of me through our 35 years of marriage. Without Pal, I couldn’t have been what I am today.

I’m confident that I have done what I could, together with those who shared my vision; in case our efforts will no longer be appreciated in the future generations of Silliman and Negros Oriental doctors, I remind myself of the poem Anyway:

“The good you do today, people may forget tomorrow; do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; give the best you have anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway.”

I have realized that when the vision comes together with the need, the dream ceases and becomes reality.

Congratulations to my fellow Outstanding Sillimanian Awardees. And to all, let us continue sharing our knowledge, our time, and of ourselves. In giving, we actually receive more.

_____________________________________________

Author’s email: [email protected]

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