MANILA -- The overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) sector assailed Monday the Health department for failing to act on the continued monopoly practice of the Gulf Cooperation Council Approved Medical Centers Association (Gamca) giving medical exams for workers.OFW POEA
More than a hundred OFWs, recruitment agency officials, and their families trooped to the Department of Health (DOH) compound in Manila and slammed Health Secretary Enrique Ona over his failure to implement the law against the practice of "decking".
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"We wrote to Secretary Ona appealing to
him to penalize the erring medical clinics under Gamca. Unfortunately our appeal remains unheeded," said Federated Associations of Manpower Exporters president Alfredo Palmiery.
He noted how the Republic Act 10022 or the amended Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act particularly state that “no group or groups of medical clinics shall have a monopoly of exclusively conducting health examinations on migrant workers for certain receiving countries”.
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Section 16 also states that it is the DOH that shall “regulate the activities and operations of all clinics, which conduct medical, physical, optical, dental, psychological and other similar examinations, on OFWs as a requirement for their overseas employment.
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What is more surprising, Palmiery said, is that the DOH had already issued an administrative order to stop the practice of decking by GAMCA.
“But strangely, despite the said issuance and admonition from the Congressional Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs, the DOH has refused to impose appropriate sanctions against the violators by the simple acts of suspending and cancelling the accreditation of the medical clinics under GAMCA,” Palmiery said.
Decking is defined as the practice of requiring the overseas workers to file on-line their requests for health examination through the GAMCA website, which then assigns and farms them out to the 17 medical clinics that are members of the association.
