Because life is valuable
Imonths’ salary to keep alive a patient hooked to a respirator and undergoing dialysis. Consultants, even on their rest days, rush to PGH to assist patients in dire straits without expecting any payment.”
PGH acquired numerous hospital equipment, instruments and devices to augment its operational capability in 2015. It also completed several infrastructure projects, including the renovation of the PhilHealth Ward (Ward 12), the construction of Decontamination Unit, the repiping of main sewer line of the Left Central Block, and the construction of the OR Pharmacy Extension Room at the Central Block (CB) Building. It is also ISO 9001:2008 certified.
Gap, this year’s University of the Philippines Alumni Association awardee for public service and good governance, is grateful to his “four Marias.” They are deputy director for health operations Dr. Ma. Antoinette Habana, Dr. Margarita Luna for fiscal services, Dr. Teresa Benedicto for administration and Cecille Pena for nursing services.
*** Being PGH director is no easy task, especially since majority of Filipinos are poor and they think of the PGH as their only hope. In fact, to many of the impoverished, the sight of the PGH is a vision of the Promised Land.
“I think one patient’s grateful comment sums it all up,” explains Gap when asked why he chose public service over practicing only in private hospitals here and abroad. “After undergoing a procedure to remove a tumor through a small opening in the skull, an OFW profusely thanked us and said,
‘Maraming salamat po doctor. Dahil sa experience po namin sa PGH, bumalik po ulit ang tiwala namin sa gobyerno’.” In 2011, Gap was bringing around a group of world-class pediatric neurosurgeons around the pedia ward of PGH. One of them was a tough lady neurosurgeon of the Isareli Army. As they stopped around a bed where a three-month-old baby was recovering after surgery for severe hydrocephalus, the lady neurosurgeon was asked by the mother of the sick baby, ‘Kain po tayo’.” She then asked Gap what the baby’s mother was saying. “I told her that the mother was inviting her to eat with them. She then choked and shed some tears, saying ‘How can they even think of even sharing when they have so little’?”
Gap, tearing himself, then looked her in the eye and answered, “…because they are Filipinos.”
n 2009, Dr. Gerardo “Gap”
D. Legaspi, a renowned neurosurgeon, was at the peak of his practice. You were lucky if you could get an appointment with him, and if he took on your case, he would assure you that he was virtually 100 percent sure he could successfully operate on you. He was a virtuoso in the operating room — not meaning to usurp God’s grace but instead be its instrument.
It was at the time that an international intern rotator from Stuttgart, Germany “shadowed” Gap at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) for two months and rotated in the hospital’s Emergency Room as well.
“He impressed me as a deeply insightful doctor and I valued his opinion. So, at the end of his rotation I asked him what impressed him the most with his stay in PGH. Apologetically, after asking if he could be frank, he told me, ‘Life is cheap in PGH.’ I was stunned and the even more painful part of it was that it was true!” recalls Gap, who graduated in 1987 from the UP College of Medicine, where he was the outstanding graduate in clinical clerkship.
The German continued to tell Gap that in the ER of PGH, if a patient came in needing intervention and he had no money to buy or pay for what was needed, there was a big chance that patient would die.
“I was never the same since that time,” admits Gap, who trained in neurosurgery at the PGH and at the Université Paris-Sud. “I told myself that no amount of neurosurgical prowess and achievement, which was my main goal at that time being someone in the peak of his practice, would solve this situation.
“Serendipitously, it was around that time that the then director Dr. Jose Gonzales offered me the chairmanship of the PGH Pay Hospital. In my mind this was a step to alleviating the perception that ‘Life is cheap in PGH.’ If I make the Pay Hospital earn more, we can plough back more funds to the charity patients and we have done just that.”
Gap was nominated to be director of PGH in 2016. “I could not say no to the nomination because inside me I knew that as director I would have more opportunities to add value to a PGH patient’s life again. Of course, also to the lives of those who serve them.” *** It is thus under Gap’s watch that the PGH is celebrating its 110th foundation anniversary, whose theme is “PGH: Patuloy na naglilingkod para sa kalusugan ng mamamayan.”
The PGH, a state-owned hospital administered and operated by the University of the Philippines Manila, is the largest government hospital administered by the university. It is the biggest hospital in the country with a 1,500-bed capacity. It is a mixed-use hospital, with 1,000 beds for indigent patients and 500 beds for private patients. The PGH, being the largest training hospital in the country, is the laboratory hospital of health science students enrolled in the University of the Philippines. This includes Photo by students of medicine, nursing, physical therapy, pharmacy, occupational therapy, dentistry and speech pathology.
The PGH celebrated its centennial in 2007, 100 years since the US government passed a law establishing it. According to its published history, the hospital has seen the worst of tropical epidemics during its early existence and the worst of the war in the 1940s. It is one of the very few Philippine hospitals that remained open all throughout the war. At present, the hospital has a bed capacity of 1,500 and around 4,000 employees.
On an average year, about 600,000 patients pass through the hospital’s halls, “the poorest of the poor,” according to its director. I know of several doctors in PGH who reach into their own pockets to help defray the costs of medicines for their poor patients, realizing that their skills must be complemented by medicine — and compassion.
Even President Duterte, who handed out a P100-million check to Gap in March this year for PGH’s indigent patients, said that he would use government funds to help agencies that serve the people, singling out PGH. “Katulad ng PGH. Mababait
and mga doktor dyan, nag-aabono sa pasyente,” Gap quoted the President as saying.
This is no legend. “It has been almost reflex for our doctors to put out money from their own pockets to provide funds for patients’ life-saving medications and procedures,” shares Gap. “I have personal knowledge of a resident who shelled out three