The Province of Negros Oriental has hired the services of a contractor to dispose of its hospital waste in their facility in Cebu.
The Province was forced to get a contractor after reports of the waste at the Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital were shown on national television. “It is being blown up by the media,” Gov. Chaco Sagarbarria told reporters in an interview last week.
He said the contractor will begin shipping out the hazardous waste in December.
Sagarbarria also said the Province has already procured an incinerator and a shredder to dispose of the hospital’s garbage.
The Province, he said, will slowly dispose of the solid hospital waste once they get the DENR clearance to operate the machine.
“To save money, the capitol will do it slowly. It could take two years but we stopped adding to the garbage already,” he said.
Gov. Chaco said the solid waste to be disposed had accumulated over the past years.
In an earlier interview, Dr. Liland Estacion, Provincial Health Office (PHO) chief, told the Philippine News Agency said the NOPH stockpiles its waste in storage units behind the hospital where disinfection is done daily.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health is eyeing the development of the Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital as a DOH hospital.
Dr. Nikka Hao, regional director of the DOH for the Negros Island Region, told reporters in Dumaguete last week that as of the moment, there is only one government tertiary hospital in the Negros Island Region, the Corazon Locsin Montelibano Memorial Medical Center in Bacolod City.
She said the DOH has already sent two teams to Dumaguete to assess the facilities of the NOPH.
Dir. Hao said she has heard of the plan of the Province of Negros Oriental to spend P3 billion to construct a medical complex at the NOPH compound and its neighboring areas but they are still pursuing the plan to nationalize the NOPH.
Making the NOPH into a DOH hospital, she explained, will mean that the operations and salaries of the medical personnel will be paid by the Department of Health. A national hospital, she added, will usually have a specialty and will also be an instructional facility.
The DOH official also said they are looking at improving other hospitals and health centers to ensure the availability of eight government health services to every Filipino.
These services are to boost immunization, improve nutrition, combat tuberculosis an HIV, improve mental health, environmental protection and non-communicable diseases.
“These services should be available at most 30 minutes away from every Filipino,” she said. (AP)
