Senators push for more public med schools to produce additional 80K doctors
Published August 24, 2020 9:30pm
By DONA MAGSINO, GMA News
The Philippines needs to open more public medical schools to produce more doctors within a decade, several senators said on Monday as they tackled a bill seeking to provide medical scholarship to Filipinos.
Senator Joel Villanueva, sponsoring Senate Bill No. 1520 or the proposed “Medical Scholarship Act,” stressed that the country is lacking 80,000 more physicians to meet the ideal doctor-to-population ratio of 10:10,000.
He said there are over 84,662 licensed doctors in the Philippines but only 28,428 are practicing in the country—the rest were “unaccounted for.”
They are either practicing abroad or not exercising their profession, Villanueva said.
Of those in active practice in the Philippines, more than 10,000 are located in the National Capital Region while the rest are distributed in other parts of the country.
