The Women’s Board of St. Luke’s Medical Center has long thrived on a profound and enduring compassion. Through trial and glory, poverty and prosperity, there is a bedrock fealty that has been kept intact since the time of its auspicious birthing in the providential year of 1908.
A group of expatriate women led by Spanish-American war veteran and head nurse (of St. Luke’s Hospital at Calle Magdalena) Clara Thatcher Main gathered that year at the home of Gov. Gen. W. Cameron Forbes to lay the foundation of the Women’s Board. Its initial purpose — to encourage Filipino women to take up nursing and give a lift to local society’s regard for the nursing profession — was quickly expanded to include a two-pronged goal that complemented the former: to raise money for a scholar’s program to pay for the nursing education of girls whose parents were not financially able to do so, and to raise funds as well for its campaign to promote awareness about the then mission hospital’s altruistic work and needs.
The first women’s volunteer organization in the Philippines, as well as in a hospital in Asia, and the only surviving all-volunteer group in a hospital in the country, the WB is likewise the forerunner of bazaars in the country. Its upcoming annual Christmas bazaar on Nov. 8 and 9 at the Greenhills Shopping Center is its major fund-raiser (it was in 2000 that the WB adopted GSC as the permanent venue, thus starting its now-enduring relationship with its loyal and generous supporter, the Ortigas & Co Partnership Ltd.).
Among the WB’s many firsts is its role in the founding of three significant hospital components: 1) It assisted in the setting up in the mid-’60s, of the clinical pastoral care training program, a first in a hospital in the Philippines and in Asia; 2) It campaigned for and underwrote the construction and purchase of equipment of the very first intensive care unit in a hospital in the country; and 3) It established in 1992, in partnership with the hospital’s then Cancer Center, the patients’ forum, a group therapy interaction program for cancer patients and their families-caregivers, indeed a pivotal development in patient care that has been copied in a number of local hospitals.
Another major fund-raiser is its 80-year-old Thrift Exchange (TE) that sells, in addition to very low-priced snacks for the patients of the out-patient department, good-as-new, second-hand goods as well as white elephant items. To this day, the WB continues to tap kind hearts to donate goods or cash to the TS and help sustain the WB projects for the poorest of the poor among SLMC’s patients.
And now, the Women’s Board is coming out with a centennial book that poignantly walks the reader through 100 years of history, allowing the reader to experience vicariously WB’s ups and downs, triumphs and defeats, joys and pains, plans and expectations for the third millennium.
The reader will find one thing standing out in the WB history: Decades before CSR (corporate social responsibility) became the gospel of top corporations in the global village, the 105-year-old, non-stock, non-profit St. Luke’s Medical Center (now an industry heavyweight in the region and perhaps, soon in the world) has been living out and practicing CSR through its partner, the all-volunteer, non-stock, non-profit Women’s Board.
The workshop, where volunteers beautifully and painstakingly handcraft decor as well as functional gift items (like kitchen towels with cross-stitched and/or knitted hems/borders) to sell at its annual Christmas bazaars as well as to meet orders from faithful clients/benefactors, likewise has been a major source of funds for its charitable projects since the pre-war times.
The funds generated underwrite the WB’s many services and charitable endeavors (among which are periodically supplying vaccinations like HPV, MMR and hepa-B, as well diagnostic tests and treatments, to the extent its meager funds would allow). Likewise requiring a lot of funds are the daily soup kitchen in the Social Service Section of the OPD and its special centennial project, another daily soup kitchen as well as the feeding of merienda of biscuits and milk (Gain School Advance donated by Abbott Laboratories) — interspersed with periodic vaccinations/checkups — to the schoolchildren of Roxas Elementary School. The latter is a joint project of the WB and the Pediatric Department of St. Luke’s.
Among its other hospital services are the lactation program where the volunteers teach and give one-on-one lectures to newly delivered mothers (St. Luke’s massive breastfeeding program gave SLMC the distinction of being recognized on paper by the DOH as the first, and so far only, baby-friendly hospital); the magazine/library cart that lends magazines and inspirational readings to the patients’ caregivers (needless to say, the WB covets the donation of magazines and other readings); and its story-telling sessions for recuperating pediatric patients.
This is the Women’s Board at 100 — compassionate, compelling, constant, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.