WITH poor eyesight due to diabetes, I can hardly read, even with the aid of glasses. That’s why I find, or hear myself guilty of the anti-profanity ordinance just passed by the city council each time I can’t read the labeling of my maintenance medications for the heart and complications of being a dialysis patient for three years now.
At least, I know Soludexide, that tiny, red ovate for the heart the moment I see it. My problem are the others which are labeled but which you can hardly read on the glossy package.
So I bought a magnifying glass to be able to decipher, at an angle so the glare from the packaging does not blur the eyes.
The Department of Health, or whichever is the right government agency, can and should look into this need. Especially so that these medicines are mostly for my age-group of senior citizens whose eyesight and other faculties are defective. This is all we can do – to appeal to health officials and medicine laboratories to make medicine labeling patient-and senior - friendly.
The other thing that peeves seniors my age is the strict requirement of pharmacists for you to have your medicine list and senior citizen’s identification card each time you buy your maintenance medicine.
Notwithstanding the fact that pharmacists like those at Mercury already know me for having repeatedly bought from them, they won’t give the discount if you don’t show them these evidences of your being senior each time you buy.
Again, the Department of Health might want to require pharmacies to have on file a photostat copy of your ID card your senior citizen’s booklet. That way the botica can hold on to you, knowing pretty well that your next medicine purchase will be from the same drugstore where your documents are.
At least, lawyer Isagani Liporada and I were able to ease the difficulty of senior citizens when they are ignored by botica salesgirls in favor of young and handsome customers. Gani and I drafted an ordinance that now requires drugstores to provide a numbering system so that customers are served on a first-come-first-served basis, not on their looks and age.
Meanwhile, I have to obtain and reproduce my papers (social case study report, medical certificate, certificate of indigency and other documents) to enable me to request senators, congressmen and the Department of Social Welfare and Development for fund assistance to cover the shortfall of my dialysis payments for the year.
Still pending in Congress is a bill making dialysis a free emergency procedure that dialysis patients initiated, together with their suggestion that the medical fund of legislators be pooled from which our dialysis payments can be automatically charged.
Another issue we have been harping on is the failure of the DOH to open dialysis centers in all provincial and city hospitals in the country. The lack of public dialysis centers in Region 1, 2 and 3 forces patients there to travel to Baguio for their twice or thrice-a-week treatment.
Why can’t the DOH open dialysis centers in all of the provincial hospitals when doing so would not require budget on the part of the government. All the DOH will do is to provide the space for the center and the winning dialysis provider will install the life-saving machines and hire nurses and doctors to operate the same.
The failure of the DOH to look into this need has resulted in the continuously increasing number of patients seeking treatment at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center. BGH is supposed to be for patients from the Cordillera but it has to accommodate patients from the lowlands which fail to put up their own centers.
E-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com.