DAVAO CITY—Former Health Secretary Jaime Galvez Tan asked the Department of Health to clarify its policy on traditional birth attendants, or hilot.
“It’s nowhere in that Department of Health [DOH] policy that mentioned about banning the hilot from attending to birth deliveries,” Galvez Tan told reporters here, after speaking on Wednesday at the First Health of the Lumad Summit at the Brokernshire Resort and Convention Center.
He said it was “unfortunate” for government health personnel to misconstrue the order to take out the hilot from their traditional role as birth attendants in areas where government facilities are too far away from being accessible for rural women.
“Unfortunately, it is in the health facilities where a lot of maternal deaths are happening, and with no disaggregation of data is being done to tell us where these women came from, from what tribe or regions they belong.” He said the misinterpretation was commonly committed at the local government level, after the DOH issued the controversial Administrative Order 29 in 2008. “They have banned the hilot, and directed that all birth deliveries should be done only at the health facilties.”
“I think it’s time for the DOH to clarify this policy, because we have to restore the traditional role of these hilot and after admitting that many deaths of pregnant women are happening in these government facilities,” he said. “For one, our government services are not really doing enough to attend to pregnant women,” he said.
Jean Lindo, a community-health instructor at the Davao Medical School Foundation and a cofounder of the health-advocacy group Kaabay, said she would recall gathering all the hilot in the Davao area to confront the regional DOH office here, after the order came out that warn the hilot of getting penalized if they still attend to birth deliveries.
“Maybe that order came out from the intention of the DOH order for safe deliveries and only at established health facilities,” she said. She recalled that the DOH maternal and child care coordinator that time assured the hilot that the regional DOH office would not enforce a supposed order to penalize them from attending to birth deliveries.
Tan said the batch of health researches being presented in the summit has “in fact, paid tribute to the traditional medical practices among tribal communities, and it would be a good way to start rethinking how the health sector would allow its practice.”
The researches would be presented in the breakout sessions with designated area of interest.