2018 budget will go to health services .............

Sec. Duque: Huge portion of DOH’s 2018 budget will go to health services for the poor UNTV News UNTV UNTV NewsDecember 27, 2017 MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Health (DOH) has an approved budget of 167-billion pesos for 2018 — the biggest budget the Congress approved for the Health Department. With the new leadership of the DOH, the agency is prioritizing to allocate a huge chunk of its budget to health services for poor Filipinos. “Well, 2018 a chunk of that, of the P167 billion, about P55 billion of that goes to PhilHealth for the subsidy of the premium payments for the indigents under the sponsored program as also identified by the DSWD under the NHTS or the National Household System,” said Sec. Francisco Duque III. According to Secretary Duque, the agency will also use the said fund to determine the number of families under the poverty line. The DOH also targets to lower the number of top health cases in the country like dengue and malaria as well as communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases. It will also cover pulmonary diseases like tuberculosis, as well as cancer. “We would like to see also a lot more provinces that will be declared as Malaria-free. We will accelerate. We will press on the accelerator to make sure that our targets are achieved these tropical diseases, these communicable infectious diseases and also equally important the non-communicable diseases or the NCDs being responsible for the most common causes of deaths in the Philippines,” said the health secretary. The DOH will also intensify its the program against human immunodeficiency virus or HIV as the number of individuals contracting the said diseases rises. Last September, the DOH epidemiology bureau recorded more than 900 new cases of HIV infection. “We need to make sure that the efforts to bring it down are not hampered and so it is very important. We need to intensify programs to ensure that the cases of HIV/AIDS will not further rise,” said Sec. Duque. Health Secretary Duque vows to make DOH the leading government agency in providing services to those in need. — Aiko Miguel | UNTV News & Rescue The post Sec. Duque: Huge portion of DOH’s 2018 budget will go to health services for the poor appeared first on UNTV News.