The Health Emergency Management Bureau (HEMB) of the Department of Health (DoH) of the Philippines, together with the World Health Organization, concluded recently a series of planning workshops as part of the “Enhancing the Philippine Emergency Medical Teams” project. The project aims to reinforce the current emergency response capacity of the agency and ensure timely mobilization of its resources during disasters .
The cluster workshops were follow through activities of the National Strategic Planning Workshop conducted by the National Technical Working Group for Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) held last November 2016. These were conducted to further pursue the implementation process to form Type 1 EMT in each of the country’s 18 regions, two (2) Type 2 EMTs nationwide, and Specialist Cells.
The workshops were conducted among 5 different island clusters. Regional DoH staff assigned to the HEMB and Chiefs of DoH Hospitals were in attendance. At the end of each workshop, participants presented the development of a governance structure on a regional level, gap analysis of existing regional response capacity compared to the standards cited in the “Classification and Minimum Standards for Emergency (Foreign) Medical Teams in Sudden Onset Disasters”, and an action plan towards the institutionalization of an EMT Type 1 for every region.