Nature of the Work

The most exciting part of being a Municipal Health Officer is the flexibility of its work, there is

no dead time when working, you get to serve people, and lastly, the situation in the Health

Center is not the same everyday specifically on the cases of each patients, who says being

Municipal Health Officer aka Doktor ng Bayan is Boring?

On a typical day as a physician, Doctor Bulosan normally checks up and treats his patients, has

Municipal Health Officer things to do, have lunch, go back to work, and etc. But then, after

Covid-19 struck, the toxic situation in the Health center proliferated. When people were stressed

back in the first wave, including me, how much more to our medical frontliners. Imagine

fighting with only a defense (Personal Protective Equipment) you have and not knowing the

strategies of the enemy/villain, particularly the COVID-19 during the times without vaccine.

Since Doctor Bulosan started being a Municipal Health Officer during COVID-19, the nature of

his work that I can provide has been updated. The Nature of Work Enumerates: Consulting Of

Patients from Person Under Investigations (PUI), Separation of check up between PUI and non-

PUI patients, Providing Remedy/Advising them.

The first thing that Dr. Bulosan and his team does is to give their numbers to contact whenever

they have symptoms of Covid-19 or have a family members who are sick, second is to advise

them what to do, when they can handle the virus within their system they can stay at home at

quarantine themselves within 14 days but when they do not get better, the team of Dr. Bulosan

will refer them to the nearest available hospital that can accomodate COVID-19. Whilst it

becomes easier when there already has a vaccine and testing kit. When a patient calls that they

needed to be tested for COVID-19, the team will go to their house and have it, when it is

negative, the patient will not be quarantined, while if it turns out to be positive, then the patient

will undergo quarantine.

The Separation of Check up between PUI and non-PUI patients is not easy, because even the

health center is sometimes in lockdown due to surge of COVID cases and an infected health

personnel can affect the team so they need to sanitize the whole building. I guess people were

scared to have the check up and they self medicate with available over the counter drugs in the

pharmacy to avoid the encounter of COVID-19 case. But the night duties of midwives when the

health center is not in lockdown is always available even when cases of the virus are high. They

just become conscious of their safety and of the patient and its delivery.

I can see in their work that they are very resilient, adaptable, wise, productive, and have strong

team work. I am inspired by it and hope to work with those skills soon!
The strict quarantine protocols also are to be proud of, according to Dr. Bulosan and his team, it

is very effective because they can control the surge in the municipality, the in and out of

residents in San Manuel help the virus to not spread.

The responsibility of a Municipal Health Officer in this pandemic is not easy, especially to the

pronouncing of deaths of the people and how they will be buried instantly without even

mourning. but even though you are sad or dismayed, I learned that you can only manage what

you can control, and that is on being a doctor during this pandemic and the next accountable

years on being a doctor.

When that point was explained to me, I was tormented to not continue to medicine anymore

because of the possible pain that I will go through in pursuing that career.