The DOH-BUCAS Center at San Miguel Foundation’s Better World Smokey Mountain facility in Tondo, Manila, is now operating in partnership with the Tondo Medical Center.
THE Department of Health (DOH) and San Miguel Corporation (SMC), through its San Miguel Foundation, Inc. (SMF), opened recently a second Bagong Urgent Care and Ambulatory Services (BUCAS) Center, further strengthening their pioneering partnership to bridge public healthcare gaps especially for the poor.
The new BUCAS center, located at the San Miguel Foundation’s Better World Smokey Mountain facility in Manila, is operated in partnership with the Tondo Medical Center (TMC).
The new center builds on the success of the first-ever privately-supported BUCAS Center, also with the SMF, through its Better World Clinic in Cubao, Quezon City, which started operations in partnership with the Quirino Memorial Medical Center (QMMC) last year.
Better World Smokey Mountain — an education and training facility run by SMF in Tondo — now offers outpatient services alongside PhilHealth Konsulta Packages, with medical staff from TMC attending to BUCAS Center patients.
The Better World Clinic in Cubao was established to cater to underprivileged women and mothers. But when it partnered with QMMC to open a BUCAS Center, it started providing free consultations, diagnostic services, medicines, and integrative health sessions to a broader spectrum of the community.
The facility has also conducted 15 health education sessions thus far, promoting better health and wellness practices to hundreds of participants.
BUCAS Centers are designed to address healthcare needs that rural and city health units cannot always address, such as lab work, diagnostics, and minor surgical procedures.
While laboratory services and certain medical procedures may be available in higher-level government hospitals, these facilities primarily attend to emergency and complex cases — often resulting in long waiting times for patients with more routine or less urgent needs.
SMC became the first private partner of the DOH in the rollout of the BUCAS program, offering facility space at its Better World Clinic in Cubao to QMMC as a benchmark for how the initiative can work, particularly in high-density urban areas where gaps in medical care access are most pressing.
By readily providing essential medical services in the community level, the BUCAS Center run by SMF and QMMC made it possible for patients to be treated sooner. This setup helped ease the burden on public hospitals, which must prioritize emergency and critical care cases.
Driven by a deep sense of “malasakit” — a core value of SMC — SMF not only provides the space for consultation rooms and an activity hall, it also facilitates the identification of patients who can avail of free high-quality medical services under the program.
Following this pilot public-private partnership model with SMC, the DOH has already opened 50 BUCAS Centers nationwide, based in public hospitals or in facilities of private sector partners.
“This is the kind of impact we want to make: help patients, especially the poor, recover
faster, return to their daily lives, and thereby strengthen communities,” said SMC Chairman and CEO Ramon S. Ang.
“Many of our kababayan who fall sick are left waiting because the system is overwhelmed.
That is where BUCAS Centers come in. It’s an opportunity for our Better World facilities to step
in and make healthcare more accessible, ensuring that those who need minor procedures and
essential medical services don’t have to wait any longer.”
Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa originally envisioned the BUCAS program as the centerpiece of his “28 for 28 by 28” initiative with the goal of establishing 28 urgent care centers to serve 28 million Filipinos identified as most in need of accessible and quality healthcare by 2028.
Under the program, all consultations at the facility are free of charge, and PhilHealth will cover most laboratory examinations. However, as the state insurance firm does not cover some lab tests, a patient can opt to pay for it or proceed to the Malasakit Center for assistance.
With two fully operational centers under the San Miguel-DOH partnership, the company is exploring the possibility of transforming its existing community clinics in different provinces into BUCAS Centers, if partner hospitals can be identified.
At present, the BUCAS Center at BWC-Cubao is open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays with QMMC
Dermatology Department consultations twice a month. The BUCAS Center at Better World Smokey Mountain in Tondo is open on Mondays and Tuesdays.
To access BUCAS Center services, patients must only schedule a consultation at the Better World Clinic Cubao and enroll in the PhilHealth Konsulta Package of QMMC.
Patients can also enroll in PhilHealth Konsulta by calling the PhilHealth Corporation Action Center at (02) 8441-7442.
