The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) is strengthening its collaboration with the Philippine Heart Center (PHC) to boost services to impoverished patients.
PRC chairman and chief executive officer Richard Gordon with the renewed collaboration, the PHC will ensure accessible and stable supply of blood for patients of the medical institution.
“PRC always pursues avenues to reach out and help more people. It is always available when the Heart Center runs out blood supply, and now even more so with this renewed partnership,” Gordon said.
The former senator added that the Red Cross survives by the generosity and trust of its blood donors. “We cannot bring replacement donors to the hospital because it is not under our charter. Our mission is to help Filipinos in need of blood supply.”
“We bring what people need, and in this case blood, no matter what happens, and we want to bring them to a larger group of people who desperately need them,” he stressed.
Dr. Gwendolyn Pang, PRC secretary-general, said renewal of the PRC-PHC ties could be beneficial to both institutions.
“For PRC, it is crucial to forge partnerships with hospitals like PHC to ease the burden of the majority of Filipinos looking for medical treatments. PRC’s partnerships with hospitals like PHC will provide blood immediately required for medical and surgical procedures,” Pang noted.
“We want to make blood available to every Filipino in dire need of it and free them from the additional burden of shelling out significant amounts of money in exchange for blood,” Gordon said.
“Many of the patients are already weighed down by expenses incurred from traveling to the city to get immediate medical attention, and this partnership will help ease their burden,” he added.
To date, the PRC has served 90,788 patients with a total of 221, 668 units of blood that have been collected.