Public-private partnership strategy in acquiring facilities for radiotherapy services and for education and training of medical physicists in southern Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines is an archipelagic country with an estimated 105 M people. Although cancer is the third leading cause of mortality, only a few radiotherapy centers are in operation and majority of these are located in the capital region of Manila in the island of Luzon. There is only a single school, a private university, located in Manila, offering the master’s degree in medical physics. Mindanao Island, considered the breadbasket of the nation, is the second largest island of the Philippines. It is located in the south and has a population of about 22 M people. Only four hospitals in Mindanao provide radiotherapy services using a linear accelerator (linac) while four radiation oncologists and seven medical physicists serve the needs of the entire island. We describe in this paper the public-private partnership (PPP) strategy we are proposing in order to acquire a medical linac to be used for radiotherapy at a local private hospital, for research, and for a planned medical physics education and training program in the largest state university in Mindanao.