CNA Correspondent Podcast: The healthcare system in the Philippines is failing ordinary people, but what can be done?
Cases of patients waking up mid-surgery because of low-quality anaesthetic have been reported in the Philippines.
Mining the deep reporting of CNA's correspondents, Teresa Tang goes behind the scenes with journalists on the frontlines to unpack the biggest Asian and global stories.
Jump to these key moments:
- 1:06 Getting hospitalised in the Philippines
- 5:21 The problem with buying medicines
- 11:03 Situation outside hospitals
- 14:14 The plight of healthcare workers
- 18:33 The government's role
Essential medicines cost at least three times more than international prices in the Philippines. Nurses are overworked and underpaid. The sick have resorted to camping on hospital sidewalks as they wait to be seen.
Teresa Tang sits down with CNA’s Buena Bernal to talk about the state of the healthcare system in the Philippines and why it’s falling short.
If you're hospitalised and it takes months at a time for you to recover from your disease, then health spending can be catastrophic. And I'm not using that word just to incite panic, catastrophic health spending is an actual term in (our) health sector.
A patient woke up in the middle of a surgery due to low quality anaesthetics ... and that's because the current law forces medical facilities to buy the cheapest medicines and not the best one (for our patients).
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Have a great topic for us? Drop the team an email at cnapodcasts [at] mediacorp.com.sg
