BAGUIO CITY – The City Council approved on first reading a proposed ordinance establishing a community-based rehabilitation training and diagnostic center for persons with disabilities (PWDs) in the city, adopting a comprehensive program and for other purposes.
The ordinance authored by Councilors Arthur Alad-iw, Maria Mylen Victoria G. Yaranon and Francisco Roberto A. Ortega VI stated that it will be a policy of the local government to adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development which shall endeavour to make essential goods, health and other social services and it will also be the city’s policy to establish medical rehabilitation centers and to adopt an integrated and comprehensive program for the health development of PWDs which shall ensure the accessibility of health services to the PWDs.
The ordinance aims to establish a self-sustaining training and diagnostic center for persons with disabilities in the city where multi-trainings needed to address the special concerns of all categories of disability shall be institutionalized and integrated with each other.
The ordinance added that the center shall serve as a city level community-based rehabilitation center of training and resources, both human and technical, and it shall monitor, supervise, and provide support to the technical needs of its satellite community-based rehabilitation programs and initiatives in the city’s 128 barangays.
Further, the center shall likewise provide direct diagnostic and rehabilitation services to walk in PWD clients and residents of the city, who are in need of special health care.
The ordinance stipulated that the center’s programs and services shall be mainly focused on the provision of primary diagnostic and rehabilitation services and therapy on medical, eye care service, hearing services, physiotherapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, orientation and mobility trainings, speech therapy, psychological counselling, orthotics and prosthetics, and other devices, and special education, integrating a social and livelihood component for continuous empowerment for its PWD clients.
The ordinance disclosed that the center shall train, capacitate, and provide specialists and trainers who specialize in each kind of disability such as psychological and behavioural disability, chronic illnesses with disability, learning, cognitive or intellectual, disability, mental disability, including dementia, and alzheimer’s disease, visual or seeing disability, orthopedic moving, communications deficits and such other disability which may be later determined.
The center shall integrate and institutionalize educational support and livelihood and skills trainings in its rehabilitation programs that will enable the PWDs of the city, their families, and community partners to make the best use of the opportunities that occur in their lives during and after the course of rehabilitation and once they are ready to be integrated back to the community.
Moreover, the center shall train its community-based rehabilitation workers to provide basic levels of service in early childhood intervention and referral, especially to medical rehabilitation services; education and regular schools, non-formal education where regular schooling is not available, special education in regular or special schools, sign language training, braille system training, and training in daily living skills.
By Dexter A. See
