They just lie there...

ONA is the first, if not the only, refuge of thousands of city residents who need to be hospitalized. With its inadequacies in space, medicines, and medical and laboratory supplies, many of our residents have to go to the Jose B. Lingad Hospital in the City of San Fernando.

It’s a shame that we could not take care of our own, particularly because other LGUs like the Province of Pampanga, under the administration of Gov. Lilia G. Pineda, do provide quality health and hospital services to the province’s more than 500 barangays. Why can’t we do the same for the city’s 33 barangays?

ONA, if you still don’t know, is Ospital ning Angeles. On target, as usual, is this latest Alexander S. Cauguiran broadside at the sitting administration.

Far from the modernized medical center that gained centerpiece status in the first few SOCAs of the Pamintuan mayorship, ONA has apparently reverted to that sad, sorry state of public health facilities that has come to be euphemized as “Mona Lisa” hospital – not so much for Da Vinci’s masterpiece as for the lines in the song it inspired, to wit: They just lie there, and they die there... not so much for the dreams laid on La Gioconda’s doorsteps, but for the patients taken at ONA.

A case in point – fortunately, the patient lived to tell his story – happened just before All Saints Day.

A middle-manager of a posh hotel at the Clark Freeport was on his way home in the vicinity of First Street when riding-in-tandem hoodlums grabbed him and demanded that he gave his bag to them.

Yes, you may have my bag but let me just get the key to my house so that at least I could go home, he pleaded.

Whereupon, one of the thugs stabbed him in the chest, and as he slumped on the ground, his bag’s strap caught on the crook of his arm, the assailant slashed him on the chest.

A Good Samaritan of a tricycle driver took him to ONA – the victim just asked that he be taken to any hospital as he is new to the city – where, upon arrival at the emergency room was given some gauze the staff asked him to press on his wounds. Other personnel there witnessed doing their routinary ER functions of furiously texting and idly chatting.

Long minutes passed without any emergency procedures being administered. To his reckoning, it was over half an hour before he was told that he had to be evacuated to JBL Hospital in the City of San Fernando. And was taken to a waiting ambulance.

Long waiting inside the ambulance prompted him to plead to please – as he was already gasping for breath – rush him for treatment. Only to be told that the ambulance had to wait for one more patient before it could go. (In much the same way as a passenger jeepney waiting to be filled before it could go, wow!)

Long story short, he was taken to JBL and from there – his hotel having by then learned of his stabbing – taken to Medical City where he is still recuperating from a punctured lung.

In case of emergency? ONA is the last place to be. They just lie there, and they die there. Indeed! Makes one wonder if the true mission of ONA is primarily to give business to the funeral parlors and memorial parks of the city, like… Holy Mary. If you don’t get the drift here, your political naïveté is admirable.  

JBL as go-to hospital for the people of Angeles City is a stinging slap – walang kasing-hapding mariing sampal, in the immortal words of the other Rizal, Policarpio, the dearly lamented newsman of the city – to the Pamintuan administration.

It is truly a shame that the city could not take care of its own, as Cauguiran grieved.

The greater shame though is that LGUs other than the Province of Pampanga, with even lesser resources than the highly urbanized Angeles City, are not only capable but even excelling in the provision of health care to their constituents.

One need not look farther than the City of Mabalacat, which, under the helm of Mayor Cris Garbo, entered into MOAs with private hospitals as far as Angeles City and as “classy” as the Medical Center-Clark guaranteeing payments for the medical bills of its indigent constituency.

Then, there is the highly acclaimed Mexico Community Hospital established by Mayor Teddy C. Tumang in his first term, expanded through his three terms, and immediately upon his return to the mayorship, completed with a dialysis center giving free renal care to the residents, even subsidizing the cost of prescribed medicines.

Comparisons are always odious. But they can’t be helped.  

Garbo – mayor only since June 2017, and Tumang, a 2016 returnee, have taken so great a leap, so long a stride in providing for the well-being of their constituents that they are rarely, if at all, still referred to the Office of the Governor for assistance or taken to JBL. As ONA does, per Cauguiran’s lament, per the patients’ complaint.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

The greatest shame that ONA brings though impacts most upon the Pamintuan administration.

It not only does a grave injustice, but even negates all those accolades heaped upon Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan as World City Mayor awardee, etcetera, hall-of-famer Most Outstanding Mayor of the Philippines of Superbrands Marketing International Inc., etcetera, etcetera.

As they lie at ONA, so they lie too at city hall?

Shame, indeed.