“We are human, not immortal.”
Thus protested Robert Mendoza of the Alliance of Health Workers (AHW) when health-care professionals found themselves increasingly exposed to COVID-19. This was after a Department of Health (DOH) circular cut to five days the mandatory quarantine period among infected medical front liners if they are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and are fully vaccinated.
The health agency, meanwhile, retained the required isolation period for the general public at seven to 21 days, depending on their symptoms and vaccination status.
“We cannot understand why there is a distinction between health-care workers and the general public … The virus that infects [them] is no different from the virus that infects health workers,” Mendoza argued.
Fighting to protect medical front-liners is nothing new to the AHW. This group of healthcare workers’ associations and unions has been in the forefront of the struggle for the rights of health professionals even before the pandemic. But their repeated calls for a living wage, better working conditions, and a competent and inclusive health-care system gained more urgency when the COVID-19 crisis hit the country.
When health restrictions immobilized most Filipinos, the alliance managed to hold a series of virtual rallies to demand the mass hiring of regular employees, the provision of personal protective gear to them, higher wages and the immediate release of mandatory pandemic benefits. With the eventual easing of COVID-19 curbs, its members have returned to the streets to draw attention to the understaffing in hospitals, the continuing lack of personal protective equipment, low wages and the delayed payment of their pandemic risk allowance.
Formed in 1984, the 37,000 strong AHW, a broad alliance of health-care workers’ groups, has been leading the charge in voicing out discontent among medical front-liners. The group is currently made up of 18 employees’ associations from public hospitals, among them the Philippine Heart Center, the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, and the Lung Center of the Philippines. Also affiliated with the AHW are unions from several DOH-run hospitals, including the Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine.
Aside from being constantly exposed to the virus, the AHW’s biggest challenge to date is getting the benefits due them, initially in the form of a special risk allowance for those who had direct contact with COVID-19 patients from Sept. 15, 2020 to June 30, 2021.
This was later replaced by the One COVID-19 allowance, or OCA under the General Appropriations Act of 2022, and was repackaged yet again in April as “Health Emergency Allowance” or HEA.
Such changes reflect the frustrating red tape and bureaucratic delays from the DOH and Budget officials and personnel, who chronically cite lack of funds and the voluminous documents and requirements that health-care workers have to submit to get the long-delayed benefits.
When the DOH recently announced that it would need at least P141 billion more to cover the allowances for 2023 and those unpaid over the past two years, the AHW staged a “day of protest” against unjust compensation and unpaid benefits. Nearly half of the P141 billion set aside for the health workers’ allowances have yet to be funded, said DOH officer in charge Maria Rosario Vergeire, adding that the budget department was looking for more funding sources for its request of another P27 billion for the HEA for the remainder of the year.
As if working long hours in COVID-19 wards and leading marches on the street to get just compensation weren’t enough, the AHW had been accused—without proof—of having links to the communist insurgency and infiltrating the government. This prompted the Alliance to file administrative and criminal charges against Lorraine Badoy, a former spokesperson for the government’s anticommunist task force, for Red-tagging the group.
