Rx: Improving access to health services in rural areas

MANILA, Philippines - Starting this year, MSD enters into a partnership with Philippine NGO Support Program (PHANSuP) to enable six barangays of La Union province to help youths, mothers, and families have better access to basic health information and services. According to preliminary studies of PHANSuP, reports from the La Union provincial government indicate that some of the most burdensome health issues include malnutrition among preschool children, increased incidence of dengue, hemorrhagic and tuberculosis cases, significantly high illness and death rates among children and mothers, and lives lost due to heart ailments and diabetes.

When the human component of the community is in bad shape, conservation and protection of the environment become less and less a priority for the people, and a degraded environment, which remains the residents’ chief generator of income, will further undermine the lives and livelihood of the rural disadvantaged. This chronic predicament necessitates the creation of community-based healthcare as top priority, which is why the program ENAC Health or “Enhancing Access to Health Resources in Strategic Underserved Communities” insists on participatory strategies.

The three-year community health project of MSD and PHANSuP, in cooperation with the La Union provincial government, will bridge the ever-widening gap between rural and urban healthcare. The initial phase of ENAC Health will identify the needs of the community and generate response from the people who will directly benefit from the project.

MSD, its partners, and the participating barangays are motivated to plan and work for improving the knowledge and behavior of residents in La Union, and speeding up health service delivery in these communities. The stakeholders believe that the poor, even in the remotest barangays in the Philippines, should be given a decent chance to earn a living, or to simply live.