Christmas and rural health

To be quite frank, this is the time of the year when you try to avoid reading negative headlines in the newspapers. Perhaps the press should focus only on the positive during this time of the year. Many of us would be very grateful.  Whether it is graft and corruption, extrajudicial killings or the potential illness of our President, let us set it aside and go to church and thank God for the blessings bestowed on us: family, camaraderie of friends and hopefully a peaceful nation. 

My granddaughter Bianca just arrived for Christmas vacation. She is 21 and will graduate from the University of California at Berkeley this coming May. Much to my delight, she has a new mission in life: to support the poor. She even asked that her gifts should be cash this year so that she can donate to the poor. Obviously, she has been influenced by the courses on poverty alleviation which is part of her curriculum.

From my perspective, it gives me the opportunity to discuss with her and my readership the role of the Zuellig Family Foundation (ZFF), whose main mission is to support rural health. 

Allow me to give you an overview of what we have done from 2009 to 2016:

We have covered 643 municipalities and 32 provinces which affected a population of 56 million. We constructed 82 birthing facilities and maternal halfway homes affecting a population of 1.3 million. We have trained 2,068 health leaders (local chief executives, provincial/municipal health officers and DOH officials) and 228 faculty members from our academic partners. We had a budget of P729.8 million,  together with P460.7 million funded by our partners.

DOH-ZFF initiative

ZFF had a major breakthrough in 2013. A partnership with the DOH was forged in May that year. This bolstered ZFF’s vision of improving health outcomes of the Filipino poor by strengthening health leadership and governance of the country’s local leaders.

With the deal, the ZFF Health Change Model got introduced to hundreds of mayors from priority LGUs identified by the National Anti-Poverty Commission. Originally, there were 609 priority LGUs, but after assessments done by DOH regional officers, other LGUs were included in the program as well.

The partnership program, called the “Health Leadership and Governance Program” or HLGP, involves not just the training of mayors and municipal health offices (MHOs), but also of DOH regional directors (RDs) and officers, academic partners’ faculty, governors, provincial health officers (PHOs) and chiefs of hospitals. Even barangay leaders get trained through the “Barangay Health Leadership and Management Program.”

Given the number of LGUs involved, academic partners had to be invited to run the training program for mayors and MHOs. There are 12 academic partners catering to different regions. Called the “Municipal Leadership and Governance Program” (MLGP), participants undergo two training modules and practicum. A colloquium marks the successful completion of the program. During this event, mayors narrate their leadership journeys and show the results of their transformations through improvements in the six building blocks of their local health systems.

Before giving the MLGP, faculty members undergo ZFF’s “Health Leadership and Management Program,” which is the same program given to DOH development management officers (DMOs).

Duty-bound to coach mayors in their assigned areas, DMOs are taught about bridging leadership, as well as given training of trainers and training of coaches programs.

When ZFF was looking at maternal death reports in its LGUs, it found a significant number of cases occurring in public hospitals, which are either run by the provincial government or the DOH. As a result, ZFF’s program intervention for provinces centered on improving hospital systems. The “Provincial Leadership and Governance Program” (PLGP) is given to governors, PHOs and chiefs of hospitals. Primarily involving executive coaching sessions, ZFF has invited health experts to guide provincial leaders. Some DOH RDs are also coaches to the leaders.

It has been through the direct and active participation of DOH officials that ZFF learned important technical inputs and insights to make its strategy more relevant to LGUs. Thus, more than just the breadth of in terms of number of LGUs, the DOH partnership gave ZFF a depth in its interventions.

Proof of the pudding

Region 11 (Davao) is exemplary of the results produced by the Health Leadership and Governance Program:

* Includes only cities and municipalities under HLGP with complete reports since 2013; partial-unofficial

** First half 2015 data only

Sources: Field Health Service Information Systems, Bureau of Local Health Systems Development-issued forms

We would like to think that we were guided by the Chinese adage: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a life time.”