Integrated Clinical Clerkship in Emergency Medicine AY 2021- 2022

Pre-hospital care is the treatment provided to patients before they arrive at a hospital. This is somewhat the initial evaluation and care necessary to improve the outcomes of patients. In our country, this is an essential aspect as not all people have access to hospitals. Sometimes, pre-hospital care is the only medical help they experience due to inaccessibility and financial constraints. The video “Ambulansyang de Paa” shows us the current situation of many communities, especially in the far-away provinces in the Philippines. Many people succumb to death, without having the chance to see a doctor. There are no hospitals in the near vicinity, and it would take several hours for one to reach a hospital. Apart from that, there are no healthcare practitioners in those communities to even provide the pre-hospital care that could prolong the lives just enough before they can be delivered to hospitals that could provide definitive management for their conditions. Ideally, this could be addressed in the near future by policies providing opportunities for doctors and nurses to practice in far-flung areas to deliver care for patients that are acutely ill. Hopefully, along with this, more healthcare facilities will be established that could cater to these people who have been deprived of the right to health since they were born. A solution that I could think of would be providing adequate allocation of budget and funding to health especially to communities in the rural areas where healthcare services have been scarce. However, this is only a small piece of a very large problem we have.