The consortium between the Cebu Normal University and Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (CNU-VSMMC) in offering a Doctor of Medicine program will help address the poor healthcare system in rural and geographically isolated areas in Cebu and Central Visayas, an official said Monday.

Commission on Higher Education (CHED) chairman Prospero de Vera III said in a presser here that the commission will extend a PHP25- to PHP35-million “grant” to the CNU-VSMMC Consortium “to jumpstart the acquisition of equipment” for the program that is expected to start this academic year 2021-2022 for a few deserving students.

De Vera instructed CNU president Filomena Dayagbil and the College of Medicine dean from the VSMMC to conduct benchmarking through existing curricula at other state universities that have already produced successful medical course graduates.

“Too much technical expertise is available there. You should make a shortcut in the process by talking to (the) available technical experts,” De Vera said, naming some state colleges and universities in Luzon, Western Visayas and Mindanao that have been producing topnotchers in the physician’s board exam.

Lack of doctors

VSMMC chief Dr. Gerardo Aquino Jr. said the new course will address the lack of doctors in far-flung villages in the region.

“While we are located at the heart of Cebu City, our catchment of patients extends to the entire Visayas and parts of Northern and Western Mindanao. Even before the enactment of the Universal Health Care Act and the COVID-19 pandemic, VSMMC had already felt the impacts of the gaps in the health care delivery system,” he said.

The Department of Health (DOH)-run regional hospital, Aquino said, “has been taking care of patients whose cases do not exactly need the management of an apex hospital facility or whose complicated conditions may have been controlled had they been seen by a doctor earlier”.

Aquino lamented the current shortage and “maldistribution” of physicians in the region, saying that most doctors are concentrated in urban centers.

In Cebu, he said there were only 2,051 doctors in active practice as of 2017, out of whom 72 percent is in this capital city.

“This left a little over 500 doctors actively serving in the province, with only one in some towns,” Aquino said.

To address the gaps, the VSMMC chief said they proposed to CNU officials the forming of a consortium.

Scholarship for deserving students

De Vera said CNU will be the first state university in the country to offer scholarships to deserving students taking up Doctor of Medicine under Republic Act 11509 or the “Doctor Para sa Bayan Law” signed by President Rodrigo Duterte on Dec. 23, 2020.

The students can get scholarships from CHED for the tuition fee and from DOH for book allowance, he said.

The law seeks to intensify efforts to put more doctors in the barrios. It mandated the establishment of a Medical Scholarship and Return Service (MSRS) program for deserving students in state colleges and universities or in partnership with private higher education institutions in regions where no medical course has been offered.

De Vera said graduates of the medical course program will be given the opportunity to give back to the government in exchange for being state scholars by executing a “return of service agreement” through which they will render four years of service in the underserved communities.

He credited CHED’s approval of CNU’s authority to offer medical course to deserving students through the constant follow up made by the Senate President Vicente Sotto III.

Sotto, principal author of the law, said deserving students who want to join the country’s medical sector, especially those in the Visayas region, would soon get the chance to pursue their dreams of becoming doctors.

“Being the principal author of the Doktor Para sa Bayan Act, I am both elated and excited that my efforts and those of my colleagues in the Senate to increase the number of doctors in underserved areas are already bearing fruit. Nakakataba po ng puso na isipin na tayo ay nakatulong na mabigyan ng pagkakataon ang ating mga aspiring doctors na matupad na ang kanilang mga pangarap (It is heartwarming to think that we have helped give our aspiring doctors the opportunity to make their dreams come true),” Sotto said in a statement.

The senator has also been helping VSMMC to acquire funding for free medical needs of patients from the Visayas.