Iloilo Provincial Government said that more than 1,000 vaccinators in the province have not received their One COVID-19 Allowance (OCA) yet from the Department of Health.
Municipal vaccinators that served from January to June 2022 have yet to receive their OCA from the Department of Health (DOH). They are supposed to receive PhP 9,000 per month as they belong to high-risk exposure classification.
To recall, Gov. Arthur Defensor, Jr. initiated the hiring of vaccinators to augment the vaccination teams of the municipalities in a bid to ramp up COVID-19 vaccination.
Vivian Salmon, Supervising Administrative Officer of the Provincial Health Office, said they have complied and submitted all the requirements stipulated in the OCA guidelines which came out on Feb. 10, 2022 through DOH and Department of Budget Management (DBM) Joint Circular No. 2022-0001.
Submission of documents are made on-line every end of the month through the OCA Information System.
Salmon, however, said that they frequently encountered problems in uploading documents due to system error.
She said they already asked the help of DOH-6 Regional Director Dr. Adriano Suba-an relative to their uploading difficulty but still the problem persisted.
She acknowledged that two complaints were already lodged at the government’s complaint hotline 8888 regarding the delayed release of OCA of Iloilo health workers, but they are not in control of it.
She added, they have already complied everything that are being asked of them since March 2022 and the ball is already in the hands of the DOH as the OCA funds was not downloaded to the province.
Salmon said the latest information that they received from DOH Region 6 is that the OCA payroll for the months of January and February are now being processed by the DOH and maybe released soon. (ECG/ Capitol News)
