- CHERYL G. CRUZ
The Sangguniang Panlungsod of Bacolod Tuesday requested the City Health Office to submit to the SP the complete list of recipient-beneficiaries of the One COVID Allowance (OCA) or health emergency allowance (HEA) from the Department of Health.
The City Treasurer’s Office has started disbursing the OCA/HEA to recipients in the last weeks of March and is still currently ongoing, yet the SP has not received the list of qualified recipients pursuant to the colatilla when the sanggunian ratified March 1 the memorandum of agreement signed by Mayor Alfredo Benitez and DOH6 regional director Adriano Suba-an on the transfer of the OCA funds, so that its release to qualified beneficiaries could start.
Councilors Em Ang and Cindy Rojas added the colatilla in that SP session, saying they wanted to know the complete list of beneficiaries with corresponding designation and area of assignment, as well as the guidelines to qualify for the grant.
They said that many COVID-19 health frontliners, like those assigned at the Bacolod-Silay Airport at the height of the pandemic, were complaining that they were not included in the list of OCA beneficiaries.
The OCA for Bacolod beneficiaries amounted to P37 million, with 1,400 grantees as per Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran during the March 1 SP session.
Councilor Lady Gles Pallen, president of the Liga ng mga Barangay, had said that among the beneficiaries are barangay nutrition scholars, but the barangay health workers were not included due to “clerical error” in the encoding of their names.
Ang, who authored the resolution approved during the SP session April 4, requested the CHO, through the Office of the Mayor, to submit the complete list of names of OCA/HEA grantees, and the guidelines for their qualification, in compliance with the colatilla.
Under the MOA, recipients identified to be at high risk for COVID-19 will get P9,000, while those considered under moderate and low-risk are entitled to get P6,000 and P3,000 respectively./CGC
