Flight attendant Christine Dacera’s untimely death bears painful evidence of the country’s lack of emergency medical services and the need to improve our capacity to deal with health emergencies.
The police report on the case and her companions’ narratives seem to say help came too little too late for Dacera.
Clark Rapinan, one of her companions at the City Garden Hotel, said hotel employees were “quite slow” helping them get medical aid for Dacera.
Rapinan told ANC news in a recent interview that they asked hotel employees to help them revive Dacera. The hotel’s first responders could not perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They had to bring her in a wheelchair to the hotel’s clinic, where another employee performed CPR on her.
The police report also said Dacera was not brought immediately to the hospital because there was no ambulance available. Hotel employees tried to request for a vehicle from barangay officials but, in the end, had to bring her to the hospital themselves when no help was provided.
Dacera was declared dead on arrival. But could her life been saved if she got prompt and proper emergency medical treatment?
If this can happen in Makati, the country’s richest city and financial capital, how much more in remote or rural areas, far from any hospital or medical facilities?
The government has a 911 hotline that is supposed to respond to all kinds of emergencies, free of charge. It was launched in August 2016 through President Duterte’s Executive Order 56, which made 911 the nationwide emergency hotline, replacing PATROL 117.
The EO asks all local government units to establish and run 911 call centers within their areas of jurisdiction, under the supervision of the National Call Center operated by the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG).
The E911 hotline is a DILG-run security and development program that provides response and emergency assistance to people in distress. “Calls coursed through this number include those that require police assistance, fire reports, emergency medical assistance, search and rescue, and even those that concern chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive materials,” DILG said.
The DILG announced in September that this 911 service has resumed full operation after a brief hiatus, due to several of its Emergency Telecommunicators (ETCs) having contracted Covid-19.
The DILG said it has four teams, with 18 ETCs each, that work round the clock on a 24-hour work shift, handling emergency calls.
Did Dacera’s companions, the hotel employees or barangay Poblacion officials try to call the 911 emergency hotline? Did they even know there was one? Or did they fail to get through?
This bears looking into. It is important for citizens to be able to immediately call for help in whatever emergency, contacting a reliable, fully functioning 911 service. The lines should not only be working but there must also be ambulances and other vehicles with proper equipment and personnel, ready to respond within minutes of an emergency.
There’s a Senate bill 1573 authored by Sen. Sonny Angara, which seeks to improve and strengthen emergency medical services throughout the country. If enacted into law, it would mandate local government units (LGU) to establish emergency dispatch centers with adequate and qualified personnel equipped with emergency transport vehicles like ambulances.
The measure also stipulates that each LGU, hospital and health-care facility should have a minimum number of positions for Emergency Medical Technicians, the salaries of which should be included in the annual financial requirements of their respective institutions. The National Telecommunications Commission would be tasked to ensure a working 911 emergency hotline, while the Department of Health and DILG would establish the nationwide emergency medical services network.
Congress should swiftly pass this vital measure. It should be implemented along with the CPR law (Republic Act 10871), which requires cardiopulmonary resuscitation training as part of the country’s basic education curriculum.
Filipinos should be taught and trained to do CPR, which is an essential, life-saving skill. The Philippine Heart Association, which lobbied for the CPR law, said administering CPR when someone’s heart stops beating increases the victim’s survival rate by 25 percent and keeps vital blood flow to the heart and brain, therefore preventing brain and organ damage.
Every loss of life is a tragedy. But we should also learn something from it, do everything we can to prevent the same tragedy from happening again, and save a life the next time around.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano