More Visayas health workers deployed in Metro Manila

MANILA, Philippines — Thirty additional nurses from Central Visayas will be deployed to augment health workers in Metro Manila amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Lloyd Dino commended the health workers for volunteering to help, saying it is a “selfless and heroic gesture.”

“True to our promise of sending at least 100 medical frontliners from the Visayas to augment the health care capacity of NCR-Plus hospitals, today we are sending off 30 nurses,” Dino said yesterday.

Dino's office said 20 of the nurses would be assigned to the National Center for Mental Health in Mandaluyong City and 10 at the Las Piñas General Hospital and Satellite Trauma Center.

Eleven doctors, 35 nurses and four medical technologists from Central Visayas were deployed in Metro Manila on  April 8.

As this developed, the occupancy rate at the COVID-19 ward of the Region 1 Medical Center in Pangasinan, which accepts patients outside the province, is now at 70 percent.

“There are referrals from other hospitals because the waiting list for COVID patients needing hospital confinement in Metro Manila is long,” hospital director Joseph Roland Mejia said. – Eva Visperas