An Act Establishing a General Hospital with Fifty Bed Capacity in Cotabato City to Be Known as the Ghazali Jaafar General Hospital and Appropriating Funds Therefor

This establishes a general hospital with 50 beds in Cotabato City, to be known as the Ghazali Jaafar General Hospital.

It is the largest of the 4 bills in the set by bed count and the only 1 sited in a city.

The note counts Cotabato City at 37 barangays and 325,079 people, and lists the 4 hospitals in it with their capacities: the Cotabato Puericulture Center and General Hospital Foundation with 30 beds, Notre Dame Hospital with 40, the Cotabato Regional and Medical Center with 600, and the Eros Medical Clinic and Hospital with 18.

Then it makes the deduction that carries the bill. The Cotabato Regional and Medical Center serves not only the city but patients from the adjacent provinces of Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte, so its 600 beds cannot be counted against the city's population alone. Setting CRMC aside, only 3 hospitals effectively serve the city, with an aggregate capacity of 88 beds.

On the Department of Health ratio of 1 bed per 1,000, a population of 325,079 requires about 325 beds. The bill proposes 50 of them.

Setting aside the 600-bed regional medical centre is the analytical move that makes this the strongest of the 4 bills. On paper Cotabato City has 688 hospital beds for 325,079 people — comfortably above the 1-per-1,000 standard. The note's point is that the arithmetic is an illusion, because CRMC is the end-referral hospital for 2 whole provinces as well as the city, so counting its beds against the city's population double-counts them. Remove it and the city has 88 beds, which is about a quarter of what the standard requires.

That is a real and frequently missed distinction, and it applies well beyond this bill. Several measures in this registry establish municipal hospitals on the basis that a provincial or regional facility is nearby; this note is the only place in the registry where anyone observes that a referral hospital's capacity is not available to its host city in the ordinary way.

The naming is the other thing to record. Ghazali Jaafar was vice chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and chaired the Bangsamoro Transition Commission that drafted the Organic Law, dying in 2019. Naming a hospital for him puts a figure from the peace process onto a working public institution in the region's largest city — the same instinct as the Aleem Abdulazis Mimbantas Memorial Hospital in Masiu and the Hashim and Mimbantas memorial site, and the third such naming in this registry.

What the bill does not resolve is whether 50 beds is the right answer to an 88-against-325 shortfall. It is a 57% increase on the city's effective public and private provision outside CRMC, and it is still 235 beds short of the standard the note itself invokes. As with the Buldon bill, the measure documents a large gap and asks for a fraction of it.

MP Ambolodto filed 4 hospital bills over 2 days in July 2023 — Buldon, Sultan Mastura, Kabuntalan and Cotabato City — and all 4 argue from the same method rather than from hardship. Each names the catchment, counts its population from the 2020 census, lists the hospitals serving it with their bed capacities, applies the Department of Health ratio of 1 bed per 1,000 people, and states the resulting shortfall. No other hospital bills in this registry do the arithmetic. All 4 remain at Second Reading, Committee Stage.

A drafting note common to the set: the constitutional citations are unreliable. Three of the 4 bills cite the right to health as "Section 15, Article III" when it is Article II, and 1 cites the integrated-approach provision as "Section 11, Article XII" when it is Article XIII. Each bill has at least 1 wrong reference and they are not wrong in the same way, which is what happens when a shared preamble is retyped rather than copied.