An Act Creating the Bangsamoro Medical School in Cotabato City, Appropriating Funds Therefor and for Other Purposes

This creates a Bangsamoro Medical School in Cotabato City, offering the Doctor of Medicine programme and related academic programmes.

The purpose is accessible, affordable, comprehensive medical education for Bangsamoro young people, integrating the requirements of Republic Act No. 2382 — the Medical Act of 1959 — and CHED Memorandum Order No. 18, Series of 2016, which sets the standards for Philippine medical schools. The School is to provide advanced instruction and professional training, undertake research and extension services, and provide progressive leadership in response to the region's need for quality health services. It serves primarily but not only Bangsamoro young people from across the region, and may supplement existing medical schools.

Governance is a Board of Trustees chaired by the Minister of Basic, Higher and Technical Education, with the School President as vice chairman, the Minister of Health, the chair of Parliament's education committee — with a provision for the case where that person is the same as the education minister, in which event they take the chair — and the chair of Parliament's health committee. The Board is the policy-making body with enumerated powers, meeting at least once a period, and administration is vested in a President. Section 22 provides for the appropriation and for fiscal autonomy.

The region's health workforce shortage runs through this whole registry. The Lamitan hospital bill records 4 permanent physicians for a catchment of 100,150 people. The dialysis bill would require nephrologists in every government hospital. Hospital after hospital is documented as designated at a level it cannot staff.

A medical school is the only measure in the registry that addresses the supply rather than the demand. Doctors trained in the region, from the region, are more likely to practise in it — which is the structural answer to a shortage that no amount of bed-count legislation can fix.

This is the only measure in the registry that attacks the region's health crisis at its source, and the rest of the registry is the argument for it. Twenty-three hospital bills create or upgrade facilities; 3 more exist solely because designated hospitals have no staff; 1 would require a nephrologist in every government hospital in a region that does not have them. All of that presupposes doctors who are not there. A medical school is slow — a decade before the first cohort is practising — and it is the only intervention here whose effect compounds.

Seating the chairs of Parliament's education and health committees on the Board is the governance choice worth examining. It gives the School 2 standing advocates in the chamber that funds it, which for a capital-hungry institution is valuable. It also puts legislators on the body they will be asked to appropriate for, and the bill contains no conflict-of-interest provision. The drafting does anticipate 1 overlap — if the education committee chair is also the education minister, they take the chair rather than hold 2 seats — which shows the question was considered in its smaller form and not its larger one.

Anchoring the School to the Medical Act of 1959 and CHED Memorandum Order No. 18 is the provision that makes the degree worth holding. A medical school whose graduates cannot sit the Physician Licensure Examination produces nothing, and accreditation standards are not something a regional statute can waive. Naming the national instruments is the drafter conceding, correctly, that this is one area where the region must meet an external standard rather than set its own.

The siting is the unexamined decision. Cotabato City is the region's largest city and the practical place for a medical school — and the region has legislated to move its seat of government out of that city to Parang, and the Ghazali Jaafar hospital bill documents that the city's effective public bed provision is 88 beds once the regional medical centre's cross-provincial catchment is set aside. A medical school needs a teaching hospital, and nothing in this bill says which one.