2024 a blissful year for Bangsamoro health workers

COTABATO CITY—The year 2024 is a blissful one for health workers in the Bangsamoro region who served as frontline medics in the government's COVID-19 mitigation efforts from 2020 to early 2023.

The Ministry of Health-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (MOH-BARMM) and the office of BARMM’s Chief Minister, Ahod Ebrahim, facilitated the release of Health Emergency Allowance (HEA) payments from June to November 2024. These allowances, ranging from P3,000 to P9,000 monthly, cover several months retroactive to the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak in 2020.

A number of the anti-COVID-19 frontliners who received stipends are organic personnel of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region and soldiers under units of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division covering Central Mindanao.

BARMM's health minister, the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil  Sinolinding Jr., a concurrent member of the 80-seat Bangsamoro regional parliament, assumed office as minister of the MoH-BARMM just last June. He inherited a significant backlog of work, including the delayed release of the Health Emergency Allowance (HEA) for COVID-19 medics, left by his two predecessors.

The physicians Allen Minalang and Mohammad Arif Baguindali, chiefs of the Integrated Provincial Health Office in Lanao del Sur and in Maguindanao del Sur, respectively, separately told reporters on Monday, December 30, that they are grateful to Sinolinding and Ebrahim and to officials in the central office of the Department of Health for the release of the HEA to more than 4,000 barangay, municipal and provincial COVID-19 frontline workers in the Bangsamoro region.

“To all of them, we are grateful,” Minalang, who is based in Marawi City, the capital of Lanao del Sur, said.

Reporters of different radio stations in cities in BARMM and Region 12 had earlier talked in their public affairs program  about the manifestos of health workers in a number of BARMM municipalities expressing appreciation for the release of their COVID-19 service stipends. 

Sinolinding personally handed over to barangay and municipal health workers in island towns in BARMM their COVID-19 allowances. 

Health officials in BARMM provinces expressed their satisfaction with the approval by the region’s 80-seat parliament on December 12 of separate enabling measures for the establishment of the South Ubian General Hospital in Tawi-Tawi, the Aleem Abdulazis Memorial Hospital in Lanao del Sur, and the Northern Kabuntalan General Hospital and Datu Blah Sinsuat General Hospital in Maguindanao del Norte.

“These two hospitals that the Bangsamoro government is to put up in Maguindanao del Norte will boost the delivery of health services to residents of the province,” Baguindali, whose office, as chief of the Integrated Provincial Health Office-Maguindanao, covers Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte provinces. 

The BARMM government has allocated P50 million for each of the four hospital projects, which are set to begin in early 2025.

Sinolinding expressed his gratitude to his fellow regional lawmakers for voting in favor of the enabling measures for the hospital projects.

This year, more than 50 municipal health centers and dispensaries admitting patients were each supplied with ambulances, provided individually by members of the Bangsamoro parliament and procured using the Transitional Development Impact Fund from their respective offices.