PRO-Health or Promoting Rights Organizing for Health is an initiative of Government Watch (G-Watch) with Accountability Research Center (ARC), Samahan ng Nagkakaisang Pamilyang Pantawid (SNPP) and Student Council Alliance of the Philippines (SCAP), other civil society groups and local governments.
PRO-Health aims to strengthen transparency, participation and accountability in public health governance by building coalitions and alliances among citizens, groups and communities around health rights issues. It also aims to facilitate learning and problem-solving among accountability frontliners and rights defenders to come up with pro-people and bottom-up solutions to systemic barriers and hurdles to reproductive, maternal, newborn and adolescent health services.
From April 2023 to February 2024, hundreds of PRO-Health leaders and volunteer-monitors in 13 localities all over the country conducted monitoring in 257 health units and interviewed 1,364 citizen-beneficiaries and 794 health workers. PRO-Health also conducted several sharing sessions and problem-solving sessions to validate and analyze the monitoring results, coming up with a Monitoring Report that spells out a 9-point health reform agenda.
From mid 2024 to present, PRO-Health collectives at the barangay, city/ municipality and national levels have been conducting advocacy and engagement activities to follow up a total of 253 commitments from duty-bearers in response to our monitoring findings and recommendations. As a follow-up endeavor in response to our monitoring findings and problem-solving sessions, PRO-Health has recently engaged 71 barangays to make barangay health units enabled in transparency, participation and accountability, particularly setting up feedback boxes and citizen charter.
On July 24-25, PRO-Health will be holding a national conference on the ‘State of Healthcare Access’ where we will present the highlights of our initiative and share our collective assessment of the progress on health governance in the past 3-5 years. Each of the core sites of PRO-Health shall be presenting their PRO-Health Accountability Reports. G-Watch, SNPP and SCAP shall also share their assessment of health access in the Philippines given their context and based on their recent engagements with key duty-bearers.
The conference will invite key policy actors in government, civil society and private sector and will convene key allies and partners as well as core leaders of PRO-Health all over the country. Recognizing the healthcare access remains largely paid through out-of-pocket expenses, the conference will also cover how the government can improve accountability of private health institutions and professionals. It will also take up whether and how the public health system has already developed ways to prevent political capture that perpetuates patronage-based politics.
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