BARMM briefs Indonesians on regional health services

COTABATO CITY —The Bangsamoro government provided an extensive briefing to high-ranking officials from the Indonesian Embassy in Makati City on its health interventions for local communities benefiting from the peace process that Indonesia is supporting.

Indonesia is a member of the influential Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is a bloc of more than 50 Muslim states, including petroleum-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa, that helped broker the separate peace compacts of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with Malacañang. 

Radio reports in Central Mindanao on Wednesday morning, October 23, stated that the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Monera Sinolinding Jr., health minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, had talked extensively about the “good practices” of the Ministry of Health-BARMM in extending health services to constituent Muslim, Christian and indigenous communities during the Indonesia-Philippines Health Forum last Monday, October 21. 

Representatives of different local and foreign firms engaged in the production of medical support and health products also reportedly participated in the forum, held at the Indonesian Embassy in Makati City.

Sinolinding said he was treated with utmost cordiality by officials of the Indonesian Embassy, among them Mister Mudzarik, head of the economic section of the Indonesian Embassy, during his official engagement with them last Monday.   

“That activity gave us a chance to brief them on our best practices in health services that we extend to the local communities,” Sinolinding said.

The MoH-BARMM covers five provinces and three cities in Mindanao, grouped under the Bangsamoro autonomous government, which was established in 2019 based on the peace agreement between the MILF and the national government, forged with the support of OIC-member states.

Among the topics discussed by Sinolinding in the Indonesia-Philippines Health Forum were the MoH-BARMM’s extensive vaccination campaigns to forestall measles outbreak and the spread in the autonomous region of other diseases preventable with vaccines.

“Our health workers involved in those very taxing missions hike far distances, cross rivers and marshlands and ride boats to cross islands in the seas and inland swamps to reach the villagers they ought to vaccinate. That, I told them in my briefing,” Sinolinding said.