In the health sector, finger-pointing is as rampant. When a tragic error results in death or serious complications, blame is often pinned on the lowest person on the totem pole of responsibility for care – often nurse or doctor trainees. Each component of the health sector points to others as in need of reform. The fact is the entire health system is a mess and is in need of a drastic overhaul which can happen only if each and every component, from the highest technical and organizational levels to the lowest, accepts at least part of the blame and agrees to meaningful reform.

***

A recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most prestigious medical journal in North America, has published a report comparing mortality rates from heart attacks on weekends to those from heart attacks on weekdays. Not surprisingly, the study that covered cases from 1987 to 2002 in the state of New Jersey showed that victims of myocardial infarction on a weekend were less likely to receive specialty interventions and consequently had higher death rates than those whose heart injuries occurred on weekdays.

The explanation is easily verifiable by looking at the relatively empty hospital parking lots on Saturdays and Sundays when high-tech medical personnel are off-duty and out on golf courses or other recreational areas. Even here in the Philippines, even without formal studies, there are many who can testify that on weekends as well as when there are medical meetings here or abroad it is almost impossible to get the attention of high end medical specialists

***

Advocates of social justice – comprising those who sympathize with the World Social Forum as opposed to the World Economic Forum- have long argued that globalization and the free-market mentality are wreaking havoc on human values and compassionate relationships among individuals, communities, and countries. Even as each country pursues its economic goals as aggressively as possible, free market values such as competitiveness and comparative advantage override human values such as caring and sharing for fellow human beings.

A recent example is the case of serum samples from bird flu victims in Indonesia the country with the highest number of human avian influenza cases. It appears that multinational pharmaceutical firm, Baxter Healthcare based in Deerfield, Illinois, U.S.A., is negotiating a deal with the Indonesian government to buy the virus-containing serum for use in commercial flu-vaccine development. As a result, Indonesia has now suspended sending virus samples to the World Health Organization (WHO) – which needs these for its on-going program of seasonal updating of flu-vaccines for global use.

Based on free-market principles and the fact that poor developing countries (from which raw materials for drug development commonly originate) rarely benefit from expensive medical products anyway, Indonesia’s actions are quite understandable. The WHO communicable disease department is now frantically appealing to the government to now heed the imperatives of solidarity and social concerns – which the capitalist dominated economic world has long ignored.

***

Here in the Philippines, the obsession with income-generation in all aspects of social development including education is reaching absurd lows. Hare-brained schemes to profit from the education and training of health professionals are being hatched on an almost daily basis by incompetent officials appointed by an illegitimate government.

At the University of the Philippines, a gradually tarnishing crown jewel of the Philippine educational system, no less than the chair of the Board of Regents (BOR) has suggested the possibility of admitting high paying foreign students to the College of Medicine in Manila and the School of Health Sciences in Palo, Leyte. What is truly worrisome is the fact that the UP BOR chair also happens to be the chairman of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) the government agency charged with unraveling the country’s horrendous mess in health professional education.