The local government of San Juan is planning to enter into joint venture agreements with the private and public sectors to further boost the health care services of the city-run San Juan Medical Center.

“We are looking for partners for our PPP (public-private partnership) for our San Juan Medical Center. We will choose which of them can give us a better proposal,” Mayor Francis Zamora told Daily Tribune in an interview.

He said the PPP groups will be asked to provide unsolicitated proposals on what terms and conditions, services and types of investment they can provide for San Juan Medical Center.

“So, we will choose whatever is the best for San Juan. Before we proceed on that, we must finish first the unfinished construction of San Juan Medical Center,” Zamora added.

Contrary to the claims of the contractor that the renovation of the hospital is already 80 to 90 percent complete, the city engineering office says otherwise.

The mayor noted the percentage of completion doesn’t match exactly the output.

“So, this has to be resolved!” he stressed.

The construction and renovation of San Juan Medical Center was done during the previous administration through a P500 million loan.

“If you look at it from outside you think it’s already completed, but if you go inside, you will see that it’s incomplete. And the P137 million worth of equipment, which was bought by the previous administration, were not yet all tested, because when we conducted an ocular inspection during the first week of July, we found these are still placed inside boxes and crates. So, it is very impossible that these have been tested already. Secondly, how can you test these equipment if the place where they are supposed to be installed is not yet complete,” the mayor added.

“So, we can only enter into a PPP agreement once the hospital is already completed,” Zamora said.

The mayor said he appointed a retired military official as the new administrator of San Juan Medical Center.

“Gen. Joseph Acosta was a former surgeon general of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) wherein he handled 61 AFP hospitals simultaneously,” he explained.

Aside from the unfinished renovation of the hospital, Zamora also said he will file charges against those who are behind the “fake receipts” during the past administration.

“There are big remittances from the hospital wherein we found fake receipts. Like for instance, you paid P25,800, but only P800 has been remitted to the treasury. So, a big amount of money was lost,” he said.

“We have found that from 2017 to 2018, I think almost around P3.3 million of funds were unremitted though this kind of scheme,” he added.