UP-PGH steps up

As the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. scandal that erupted over the agency’s failure to fulfill the mandate of the Universal Health Care (UHC) Act unfolds, the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH) has been stepping up to provide free, quality medical services.

The hospital recently inaugurated a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT) equipment, which are high-end hospital tools for comprehensive diagnostics.

A new centralized intensive care unit is now capable of accommodating 32 patients at a time, along with a 128-slice CT scan. All of these developments form part of UP-PGH’s long-term master plan.

UP-PGH director Dr. Gerardo Legaspi acknowledged the four-year wait for the first-ever PET-CT scan facility to be procured by the government.

“But now that it’s here, we have leveled the field for poor patients, who will be using this machine 80 percent of the time versus 20 percent for paying patients,” Legaspi said, adding that the PET-CT scan procedure can accommodate up to eight patients a day at present and will be scaled up to 15 once operations become more regular.

“We need this machine badly because it has become central to the diagnosis of cancer, a major concern of our healthcare system.”

Legaspi noted the steady expansion of UP-PGH’s capabilities from basic healthcare to advanced medical interventions that have benefited poor patients in particular.

“A market vendor in Paco, Manila, who had a heart attack was wheeled into the emergency room, went through angiography, and had a stent implanted to prevent his artery from blocking up again — all in one to two hours, free of charge.”

He acknowledged that many public hospitals around the Philippines are now able to deliver similar services.

“The first patient to undergo robotic surgery in UP-PGH was a jeepney driver,” he recalled. “Furthermore, cochlear implants worth a million pesos each are now available to indigent children who will be able to hear clearly for the first time in their lives.”

Also in the growing list of UP-PGH interventions are those for breast cancer patients who can have a tumor removed followed by a one-time radiation treatment through intraoperative radiotherapy or IORT, foregoing the need for the usual 10 to 20 days of radiation therapy.

Additionally, the neurosurgeons of PGH are implanting deep brain stimulation devices on patients suffering from the rare Lubag disease or X-linked dystonia parkinsonism (XDP) that occurs almost exclusively in males from Panay Island, which stops the disease’s debilitating effects; and performing high-frequency focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatment for tremors related to parkinsonism as an additional option for Lubag patients.

The HIFU for brain intervention is only found in UP-PGH in the country and is only the second in Southeast Asia.

The hospital also has a transcranial magnetic stimulation unit, which sends electromagnetic waves to the brain for faster healing of patients with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction.

Recently, PGH installed a robotic gait trainer machine in its rehabilitation medicine department to further improve the capability of disabled patients to recover their functions.

Legaspi said the new equipment allowed UP-PGH to perform medical procedures that were otherwise expensive to obtain from private hospitals or may not even be available in most of them.

He thanked the government for its continuing attention to UP-PGH. The hospital’s P7.72-billion outlay in 2024 is a large portion of the UP budget, comprising one-third of the total amount allocated to the country’s premier state university. The rest of UP’s budget goes to its academic programs.

Legaspi explained that as a teaching hospital, “UP-PGH shapes its curriculum to produce not just clinicians but also healthcare managers and administrators who are essential for achieving a responsive universal healthcare system.”