Dr. Regina Pascua Berba, head of the PGH Hospital Infection Control Unit (HICU), is one of the Filipino Women’s Network (FWN) 2022 Most Influential Filipina Women in the World in the Innovators and Thought Leaders Category. 

Dr. Berba is an infectious disease specialist, researcher, and professor at the UP College of Medicine. She also chairs the Antimicrobial Stewardship Committee and is the head of the UP-PRIME TB DOTS and the UP Leptospirosis Taskforce. She is known as the ‘science’ behind the PGH Crisis Management Team and has led in transforming UPM-PGH into a COVID referral center.

“We were the go-to-hospital and took care of hundreds of COVID-19 patients and I was in charge of making sure that our hospital was safe not only for our patients, but also for the thousands of dedicated frontliners, doctors, nurses, support staff, UP faculty, trainees, and students,” recounted Dr. Berba in heading the COVID treatment protocols of UPM-PGH.

She asserted that in many ways, the things she and her team at HICU did in PGH defined how the country responded to the pandemic since their developed protocols would be cascaded to the platforms of social media and to other hospitals in the country. Dr. Berba spoke in several Stop C.O.V.I.D. Deaths webinar series, sharing her knowledge and expertise. 

Dr. Berba was awarded the PeopleAsia’s “People of the Year 2022” on April 2022  and 2019 Distinguished Researcher by the Philippine College of Physicians for her researches on HIV and infection control. 

Source: FWN Filipina Leadership Global Summit (filipinasummit.org), https://youtu.be/q8qrwD_i9C0

Photo credit: https://youtu.be/q8qrwD_i9C0, Luminaries shine in PeopleAsia’s “People of the Year” 2022 list – PeopleAsia