UPV Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14583/10
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Item #Communitypantry: Perceived impact of online public opinion on government policy amongst college students and local government officials of Iloilo CityBernal, Xyrille Joy P.; Socias, Pearl Rylene Mae S. (Division of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Visayas, 2022-06)Public opinion, accommodated through public policies, is a precondition to democracy. This study aimed to determine the perceptions of college students and local government officials concerning the impact of public opinion and online activism on Iloilo City’s COVID 19 pandemic responses, specifically on community pantries. It probes how public opinion expressed through the social media trending topic of community pantries shaped local government responses. A descriptive design was employed to determine the perceptions of the college students (n=108) and local government officials (n=3). Hybrid quantitative-qualitative research approach was used thorough survey, interview data and online archives (i.e.., social media postings and news reports). Major findings include: college students perceive moderate effectiveness of public opinion in influencing government policies but depict overall low Twitter outputs; local government officials perceive public opinion as essential in governance but not as important as directives from the national government; and the city's local government officials have reservations about social media-conveyed public opinion’s direct effect on pandemic-related policies. Employing the Normative Framework of Democratic Theory that deals with the foundations of democracy, democratic institutions, and policy deliberation processes, the theory explained how respondents & key informants varied in their perception of social media as a tool for public policies.Item Impacts of DOH-led policy shifts on health workers and Iloilo public hospitals' management at the time of COVID-19Bauso, Christopher Mark C.; Dayata, Audrey Eurielle G.; Niñeza, Tristan L.; Zaldarriaga, Trisha I. (Division of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Visayas, 2023-07)This study explored the actual policy shifts in public hospitals in Iloilo Province during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from January to June 2020. The study looked into how the implementation of the DOH-crafted policies impacted healthcare delivery, the health workforce, and response to the care-seeking behavior of the patients. Key informant interviews (KII) and semi-structured interviews were employed among the hospital management and the frontline workers of Rep. Pedro G. Trono Memorial Hospital and DOH-retained Western Visayas Sanitarium and General Hospital to gather data for the study. The KJI were participated in by the hospital chiefs and the IPC heads. Meanwhile, doctors, nurses, medical technologists, admitting clerks, and non-medical health workers were respondents of semi-structured interviews to determine the impacts of the new policies. Conforming to the available literature on pandemic response, this study revealed that optimal conditions were not readily achieved in the public hospitals under this study, mainly due to lack of resources to materialize the DOH-mandated changes. The policies were not fit to the current structure and service capacity of the hospitals and health workers carried the burden of ensuring adequate delivery of care. We discovered that health workers were exhaustively working despite the lack of government support in terms of benefits, compensation, and hazard pays. Furthermore, health workers encountered difficulties in rendering immediate care to patients who initially avoided hospital care resulting in an increased number of recorded ER deaths. Overall, we observed that the hospitals were able to keep up with the policy shifts through exploring feasible alternatives. However, DOH-retained institutions garner more favorable outcomes than public district hospitals since resources were directly transferred to them from the DOH Regional Office. Crafting context-specific policies addressing public health crises is recommended following the results of this study.
