THE report that over 400 clinics under the Health Facilities Enhancement Program (HFEP) of the Department of Health are lying idle indicates rank failure by its leadership to respond to the needs of those who really need health care the most because of poverty.
More than this, it is symptomatic of a governance system that merely builds structures but does not provide services for sustained public benefit.
The HFEP was designed to expand primary care access to poor and disadvantaged communities. Instead, hundreds of facilities remain non-operational even as budgets were spent for their construction.
Recent congressional hearings show only a fraction of special health centers are functional, and the public and even other government officials compare the dysfunction to other large-scale procurement scandals.
This failure to make health centers designed to cater to the needs of the poor fully operational could have been avoided.
For one thing, oversight gaps allow projects to be approved and funded without enforceable milestones that tie the release of money to service readiness.
For another, fragmented national-local coordination produces facilities that are built but not staffed, equipped, or integrated into referral and supply chains.
There’s also questionable procurement and budget processes that enable contractors and intermediaries to capture resources while accountability mechanisms remain weak.
Why should all this be a matter of concern?
Idle clinics are an immediate health-system failure. Money spent on unusable infrastructure is money taken from medicines, human resources, and prevention programs.
The visible waste erodes public trust and normalizes impunity, inviting more shadowy transactions in future capital outlays.
Practical reforms that should be undertaken include making funding releases contingent on funding with clear and verifiable guideposts. Funding tranches must be released only after independent validation that a facility is staffed, equipped, and operational.
The government should also require integrated project plans co-signed by LGUs and the DOH that allocate operating budgets, staffing commitments and supply chains even before construction begins.
To encourage transparency, the government should create monitoring teams empowered to document readiness and prevent flagrant non-compliance.
In the end, what is needed is not only to strengthen administrative follow-through and conduct investigations that move beyond headlines to timely case buildup, but also the imposition of sanctions that would prevent a repetition of such wanton waste of precious public funds.
