Hospitals struggle with staff shortages as infections rise

NCR had most number of new COVID cases on Aug. 25

- GABRIELA BARON, JALEEN RAMOS and JHON ALDRIN CASINAS

The Philippine General Hospital (PGH) is seeking volunteer health workers to augment its manpower. In an interview with CNN Philippines, Dr. Jonas del Rosario bared challenges with their finite manpower, noting the number of healthcare workers who can take care of COVID-19 patients is only limited.

The only solution is if we will cut back or further decrease our non-COVID operations, we have also reduced a lot to give way to the COVID patients. Unfortunately, we cannot totally eliminate the non-COVID patients in PGH because they also have serious illnesses, we also have to admit them, Del Rosario said in a mix of Filipino and English.

The only other way is if we could get more doctors and nurses, let's say, volunteers coming from other places, [Department of Health], or other agency who will supplement and help us and deploy these people so we can open more beds, he added.

Del Rosario said DOH already provided additional 20 health workers to PGH. The Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) already agreed to lend them their nurses.

We're trying to also appeal to some non-medical doctors in PGH who might be willing to lend a hand who can somehow help us — even for just a day, even for a month, it will help us, he added.

All hands on deck, even if you're a dermatologist, an ophthalmologist, or a surgeon training in the PGH, you need to help out in our COVID operations for now because of this surge. Hopefully, it's not gonna be that long, because we're at full capacity now, the only way that we can open more beds is if we have more frontliners.

Lack of manpower