Thursday, August 28, 2008 Cebu City, USC holding talks on sale of CCMC
CEBU City officials have started talking with the University of San Carlos (USC) for the possible sale of the Cebu City Medical Center (CCMC).
The city has authorized the school to conduct an inventory of the facility.
Cebu City Administrator Francisco Fernandez confirmed USC’s interest to buy the 47-year-old CCMC from the City. The sale is seen to lessen the City’s financial burden in running the facility.
Instead of operating a hospital, the City prefers to enroll urban poor families with Philhealth for medical insurance as a way of improving the quality of health services provided to them.
Cost
Based on initial computations, Philhealth insurance for some 30,000 urban families in the city will only cost P30 million.
Fernandez said this would mean huge savings for the City since it spends at least P160 million a year to run the 200-bed city hospital, which started operating in 1961.
What’s critical, however, is the implication of the planned purchase on the close to 800 employees and medical personnel of the hospital, who may be displaced.
In a letter addressed to the USC president Fr. Dionisio Miranda, SVD, the city administrator authorized him or the school’s representatives to make an inventory of the hospital.
“In connection with your serious interest to purchase the CCMC, you are authorized to conduct an inventory of its physical facilities, interview its personnel and patients, study its books and accounting and other actions related to you due diligence study,” he told Miranda in a letter last Aug. 22.
Fernandez told Sun.Star Cebu that they have only started preliminary discussions with the USC representatives and all proposals will be subject to approval by the City Council and the Commission on Audit (COA).
Training center
“We have always tried to privatize the city hospital, either as a whole or partial privatization, meaning selected departments only. We even offered it to the Province before. But now there is a new group that is interested, the USC. We don’t know yet what their plans are and why they are interested,” he said.
He speculated that USC is interested to operate a hospital as training center for their nursing students and those of other medical courses.
The privatization of the CCMC was first proposed in the mid 1980s, during the time of former mayor Ronald Duterte.
In 2002, Mayor Tomas Osmeña proposed to shut it down due to the inefficiency of the management and personnel, some of whom figured in anomalies and were blamed for the death of patients.
Fernandez said that if USC decides to buy the hospital, the sale will be done through a public bidding and will be sold at its current market value, as approved by COA.
“Our problem would be the personnel. What do you do with them? That will be the major concern that we will have to settle. What do we do with their retirement plan? This is a critical issue because we also don’t want them to be displaced as much as possible,” he continued.
As of the last inventory, CCMC employs 723 personnel while its nursing school has 50. Of the 723, 65 are contractual workers, 506 are casuals and 152 are regular employees.
Fernandez said they will appeal to the buyer to keep the personnel, although the City cannot force any buyer to absorb the employees, more so if the new owners do not find them to be qualified.
If the sale pushes through, the City will also have to clarify who will pay for the separation pay, retirement pay and other benefits of the employees.
“All the talks are preliminary, we also have to ask the council for approval and for authorization for the mayor to negotiate. So far, USC is just taking a look at the facility and I hope it will not create panic among the employees and the public,” Fernandez said. (LCR)
