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General Santos hospital placed under Code White Alert for holidays

GENERAL SANTOS CITY, Dec. 19 (PNA) -- The city hospital here was placed under Code White Alert starting on Monday in line with the upcoming Christmas and New Year celebrations.

Dr. Marinel Lim, chief of the local government-operated Dr. Jorge P. Royeca Hospital, said the move is aimed to ensure the hospital’s preparedness in catering to various emergencies related to the holiday revelries.

She said they have already completed the necessary preparations for the holiday operations, especially in terms of personnel, equipment and supplies.

“All the needed supplies are already in place. We made sure that our nurses will no longer need to look for them during emergencies,” Lim said.

The official assured that the hospital’s emergency room is fully equipped to handle patients with injuries caused by firecrackers and related devices.

A Code White Alert is declared when there is a mass gathering or national event and there is a possibility of emergency conditions that may need immediate medical attention, a Department of Health (DOH) briefer said.

The move refers to the “readiness of hospital manpower like general and orthopedic surgeons, anesthesiologists, internists, operating room nurses, opthalmologists, and otorhinolaryngologists, to respond to any emergency situation.”

During Code White Alert, the DOH said emergency service, nursing and administrative personnel are placed on an on-call status for immediate mobilization.

In the previous Christmas and New Year holidays, the City Health Office’s epidemiology and surveillance unit recorded at least 29 firecracker-related injury cases within the city’s 26 barangays.

A victim of a stray bullet was brought to the city hospital for treatment.

Most of the firecracker-related injury cases were caused by the banned firecracker piccolo and occurred at the height and after the Christmas and New Year revelries.

Lim urged parents to monitor their children during the holidays and make sure that they will not have access to firecrackers and related devices.

“Let’s avoid giving money to our children to buy firecrackers as they are the most vulnerable to injuries,” she said.

In the previous holiday season, she said a number of the reported firecracker-related injury cases involved children aged 10 years-old and below.

DOH Region 12 formally launched last week its “Iwas Paputok” campaign for this year that mainly focuses on the promotion of community fireworks displays.

The campaign, which is dubbed “Oplan: Iwas Paputok, Fireworks Display and Patok!,” is part of the agency’s efforts to reduce the cases of firecracker-related injuries in the region during the holiday revelries.

DOH and concerned stakeholders are presently pushing for the issuance by President Rodrigo R. Duterte of an executive order that would prohibit the individual and residential use of firecrackers and similar devices.

It promotes instead the staging of community fireworks displays organized by local government units. (PNA)

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