New hospital for teachers pushed by Loren

Sen. Loren Legarda has sought the help of her colleagues in Congress in passing new legislation that would establish a special national hospital for the country's public as well as private school teachers and their dependents.

Under the bill authored by Legarda herself, the new Philippine Teachers' Hospital would be installed in Metro Manila , to cater exclusively to the health care needs of teachers, school non-teaching staff and their dependents.

In addition, every state-run regional hospital nationwide would be mandated to build a teachers' ward, each with an initial capacity of at least 50 beds, to provide medical care and treatment to teachers and their dependents residing outside Metro Manila .

Legarda's bill proposes to appropriate an initial P300 million for the new hospital, which would:

• Provide comprehensive health care services to all teachers, school non-teaching staff and their legal dependents;

• Reinforce the existing package of services under the Medical Care Program so as to include preventive, promotive, diagnostic, curative and rehabilitative programs;

• Conduct medical examinations to ensure the physical and mental capabilities of all would-be teachers; and

• Create a system to effectively monitor the condition of patients, and generate relevant information in aid of policy formulation.

Legarda's bill seeks to give more meaning to the constitutional mandate for the state to afford full protection to labor, including school teachers who comprise the country's single largest group of professionals.

The public school system alone has a total staff of 517,515, including 471,837 teachers.

The senator lamented that a growing number of teachers are "extremely overworked, thus making them unusually susceptible to all sorts of ailments."

"Our teachers deserve adequate preventive health care, and treatment when they get sick, mostly due to job-related disorders that are aggravated by their hard struggle to survive increasingly difficult economic conditions at home," Legarda said.

Under Senate Bill 939, the new hospital would be governed by a seven-member board of directors composed of the heads of the Department of Education, Department of Health, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Commission on Higher Education and three representatives from the teachers' sector - one each from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

Legarda is also author of two other bills seeking to protect and advance the welfare of teachers.

She earlier introduced a bill that proposes to nearly double the minimum basic pay for public school teachers.

Under the bill, the entry-level pay classification for teachers in public elementary and high schools would be raised from Salary Grade 10 to 19.

This means their initial monthly pay would be jacked up to a new range of P18,471 to P21,995. The current range is P10,933 to P12,997.

Legarda also earlier introduced a separate bill that seeks to totally empower public school teachers and non-teaching staff to freely bargain for bigger pay and benefits.