The Marikina City government on Thursday said it is set to open the LGU-run "treatment hub" by the last quarter of this year.

Mayor Marcelino "Marcy" Teodoro said the treatment hub will be providing free medical check-ups, laboratory and diagnostic tests to residents, most especially indigent patients.

"It will be fully operational once all the needed machines and other medical equipment have arrived already," Teodoro told DAILY TRIBUNE in an interview.

Seated just beside the Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center, the eight-story medical facility is fully equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment such as MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging), CT (computerized tomography) scan machines, X-rays, dialysis machines, and diagnostic laboratory equipment.

"We put the treatment hub just near Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center so that whenever the patients can be easily transferred to the adjacent hospital if they needed to be confined," Teodoro said.

The local government spent P100 million for the construction of the treatment hub and another P100 million for the procurement of the medical equipment.

The construction of the treatment hub is now 95 percent complete, Teodoro said.

"There are areas where the walls are still open because the machines have to be put inside the room first like the MRIs," he said.

"This will be a great help to my constituents who cannot afford to go to a private hospital," the mayor added.

Apart from this, the city government had also constructed "super health centers" in the barangays of Fortune, Nangka, Concepcion Uno, Tañong and Industrial Valley.