Assignment of more health workers in BARMM provinces set

COTABATO CITY — The health ministry of the Bangsamoro region has started deploying barangay health workers in two Central Mindanao provinces from a pool of hundreds trained for field work in batches recently.

The Catholic Station DXMS in Cotabato City quoted in a report on Wednesday morning the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Sinolinding Jr., health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, as saying that they shall assign a total of 956 barangay health workers in the adjoining Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte to decentralize health services in far-flung areas in both provinces.

Sinolinding said the BARMM government shall provide the barangay health workers with P4,000 monthly allowance each.

Many of the newly-trained barangay health workers are either members or supporters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front that have separate peace agreements with Malacañang and whose leaders are together overseeing peace and development programs of different BARMM agencies.

The areas where the Ministry of Health-BARMM shall deploy newly-trained barangay health workers include the 63 Bangsamoro barangays in different towns in Cotabato province under Region 12.

Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Taliño Mendoza, chairperson of the Regional Development Council 12, told reporters on Wednesday that her administration will support the operations of the MoH-BARMM facilities in the 63 barangays, grouped together as BARMM’s Special Geographic Area, or SGA.

“These barangays are no longer under my jurisdiction but we will not cut our connectivity with the communities there because they are in areas inside our province,” Mendoza said.

Residents of the 63 SGA barangays became constituents of the Bangsamoro government after they voted in favor of the inclusion of their domains in the core territory of BARMM during a plebiscite in 2019.