An Act Establishing a Level I General Hospital in the Municipality of Hadji Muhtamad, Province of Basilan, and Appropriating Funds Therefor

This establishes a Level I general hospital with 25 beds in Hadji Muhtamad, Basilan.

The operative text is the template the author used across the programme, and 2 of its features matter. The hospital sits under the direct administrative and technical supervision of the province's Integrated Provincial Health Office, not the regional ministry — the ministry writes the operating guidelines and must ensure funding for the building, the complementary infrastructure, the facilities and medical equipment, and the maintenance and personnel costs. And growth runs through an annual development plan filed by the Chief of Hospital with the provincial health office, which sets the medical personnel, capital outlays and budget for the year; any future increase in bed capacity or upgrade of services must be consistent with it. When 2 bills on this template were enacted, Parliament reversed the first feature — BAA 78 and BAA 79 put the hospital under the regional ministry with a later, assessed transfer to the province — and kept the second.

Hadji Muhtamad is 1 of 4 municipalities created by Muslim Mindanao Autonomy Act No. 200. It has 10 barangays, 3,921 households and a population of 26,867.

There is 1 facility offering basic health services to all 26,867 of them — the Hadji Muhtamad Rural Health Unit. In emergencies and health crises, patients must be transported by boat to the nearest hospital or health centre in a neighbouring municipality.

The note frames the consequence as a rights question: the difficulty of accessing care deprives residents of their constitutional right to life, which includes the right to adequate and accessible health care. It grounds that in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the principle of Universal Health Coverage.

The single most important word in this note is "boat". Hadji Muhtamad is an island municipality, so the transport of an emergency patient is a sea crossing — subject to weather, to the hour, and to whether a vessel is available. A referral system that works on a road can be slow; one that works on a boat can be unavailable entirely, and no amount of capacity at the receiving hospital changes that. This is the argument that runs through all 5 of the new-hospital bills in the programme and is sharpest here and at Tabuan-Lasa.

One facility for 26,867 people is the other figure to hold. A rural health unit is staffed for checkups, basic treatment and normal deliveries; it is not equipped for a complicated birth, a serious injury or an acute abdomen. So the population's effective access to hospital care is zero, and the bill is not improving a service but creating one.

The rights framing is worth noting because it is the strongest version of an argument the whole programme makes. Rather than asserting a policy preference, the note says that inaccessible care deprives residents of the constitutional right to life. That is a claim a court could in principle be asked to consider, and it is a more demanding foundation than the general welfare language most bills in this registry rest on — which makes the 4 years this bill has spent at Committee Stage the more striking.

This is 1 of 7 hospital bills MP Mawallil filed for the island provinces. Five establish new Level I hospitals — Sitangkai in Tawi-Tawi, and Tabuan-Lasa, Hadji Muhammad Ajul, Hadji Muhtamad and Lantawan in Basilan — and 2 upgrade existing ones, the Datu Halun Sakilan Memorial Hospital in Bongao and the Lamitan District Hospital, both to Level II. Two further bills on the same template, for Tipo-Tipo and Maluso, were enacted as BAA 78 and BAA 79 in 2025. The other 7 are still at Second Reading, Committee Stage.