Family angry at hospital’s handling of five-year old boy who died

DAVAO CITY, Philippines – The family of a five-year-old boy who died under an emergency hospital care has publicly raised their complaints on the hospital for alleged neglect and prioritizing money over service.  

Jade Mark Capiñanes, a Davao City based writer, narrated this incident on his Facebook account last July 25, which has been shared more than 14,000 times by netizens as of July 28.

In his narrative, his family rushed his five-year-old brother to the Davao Doctors Hospital on July 17 after the boy experienced seizures.

The boy died later in the afternoon due to cardiopulmonary arrest, as doctors who attended to his brother believed that he possibly died from encephalitis as they earlier administered medication to stop the seizures but failed.

Capiñanes, however, raised three complaints on how the hospital handled his brother’s emergency situation.

His main complaint was on the issue of the intensive care unit (ICU), which the hospital’s admitting officer did not tell him of its availability unless he would commit to pay for the ICU.

They were advised by attending doctors that the child be immediately transferred to the ICU as the seizures cannot be managed by medicines.

Capiñanes narrated:

“The first thing they told us about the ICU was the cost, which they said could be around PHP 50,000 to PHP 80,000 per day, excluding doctors’ fees. They kept reminding us of this. As I was the only one dealing with their admitting officer, I couldn’t decide immediately. So, for the time being, I asked about the availability of ICU rooms.

““Sorry, sir,” the officer said. “We can’t divulge this information unless you decide to move your brother to the ICU.”

It didn’t make sense to me. Why offer a service without telling me its most significant detail?
There was a long back and forth. They pressured me to decide right then and there, but still wouldn’t answer my question. If my brother needed the ICU, why were we having a conversation that always circled back to the cost?””

Upon arriving at a decision to admit his brother to the ICU, they were then informed that there were no available rooms in the ICU.

“Why had we gone through that stressful conversation earlier? To be honest, it felt like the availability of their ICU depended not on the urgency of the situation but on our ability to pay,” Capiñanes said.

Another issue was an incident between the morgue and the finance section.

The family was unable to transfer the body right away to a funeral home due to the hospital’s delay in releasing the medical certificate. They were asked to pay additional fees for preservation but discovered that the body was left unpreserved in the morgue.

“Basically they were about to charge us for a service they didn’t provide,” he wrote.

The billing officer explained to the family that the hospital would not preserve the body if families could not pay for extra charges.

“Although my brother was dead, the fact remained that he had once been a human being, a little kid at that. A little humanity would have been nice. But all they were concerned about was money, money, money,” Capiñanes wrote in his post.

The ordeal was not over, as Capiñanes’ other brother found out the billing overcharged them 23,000 pesos for MRI and X-ray scans which the hospital did not provide for their brother.

They learned about this when the bill amounted to P79,000 and his brother Justine asked for an itemized invoice that saw those items.  The billing officer deducted the unused MRI and X-ray services from their final billing.

Capiñanes explained why he wrote this post:

“Far be it from me to question their medical expertise. But what I can’t accept is how their management seems to prioritize profit over people. I’m just angry at how Davao Doctors Hospital seems to have forgotten the very age-old medical oaths they are expected to uphold.”

Davao Doctors Hospital is one of the city’s major hospitals founded in 1961. 

Businessman Manny Pangilinan’s company, Metro Pacific Hospital Holdings, reportedly bought a majority stake in Davao Doctors sometime in 2015.

His post generated more than 2,000 comments, with some sharing similar experiences of being overcharged or being withheld from services because of lack of money from private hospitals.

Health rights advocate and Gabriela Davao spokesperson Dr. Jean Lindo shared her sympathy for the Capiñanes family and agreed that families should be recognized for their right to information about hospital services.

“I could feel the cry of desperation of the person for losing a child,” Lindo added after reading the post.

Lindo lamented that other countries in Asia could provide better health care services that are even funded by their governments, unlike in the Philippines where private firms run hospitals that need to balance between return of investments and services.

“You see the scenario of commodification of health services. Everything is a business transaction. It tends to make healthcare providers forget about social accountability,” she said.

The Davao Doctor’s Hospital issued an official statement on July 27 that they have reached out to the Capiñanes family.

“We are in touch with the affected family, and the situation is being urgently and thoroughly investigated. We will communicate our findings to the family privately,” it said.

The Capiñanes family told Davao Today that they are seeking advice on their next step and have yet to respond to the hospital’s communication. (davaotoday.com)