San Pedro College , The Davao City Institution That Started With a Hospital in 1948 and Became One of Mindanao’s Most Respected Health Sciences Schools

The San Pedro College campus on Guzman Street in Davao City is situated in an urban area that, in the Philippines, frequently denotes institutional longevity. It is established and embedded, as colleges that have been a part of a city’s fabric for decades typically seem, rather than sprawling and suburban.

In retrospect, the college’s birth tale seems a little unlikely because the main building is just a short distance from the commercial center of one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. It began as a nursing program affiliated with San Pedro Hospital, the first Catholic hospital in Mindanao, founded by Dominican Sisters of the Trinity, who had come to Davao in 1948 to manage a medical facility rather than necessarily construct a university.

Nearly every aspect of San Pedro College’s development is influenced by its beginnings. It was established in 1956, eight years after the hospital, with the express purpose of training nurses so the facility could run smoothly. Rather than being idealistic, the reasoning was pragmatic. With the addition of pharmacy, medical technology, respiratory therapy, radiologic technology, physical therapy, psychology, and public health to a curriculum that now includes fifteen undergraduate colleges, eight of which are in the health sciences, the institution expanded beyond its medical core over the ensuing decades.

As a result, although though it also offers programs in education, business, and the arts and sciences, the institution seems and operates more like a specialized health sciences university than a broad liberal arts college. The institutional priorities still reflect the hospital’s origins.

The best external indicator of what SPC is creating is the college’s cumulative rankings on the licensing exam. placed top in the country for the June 2016 Pharmacist Licensure Examinations. placed first in the 2014 and 2015 respiratory therapy board exams. As of early 2016, it ranked fourth in the country for nursing licensing.

The Professional Regulation Commission of the Philippines administers these competitive, high-stakes exams, and passing them requires graduates who are sufficiently prepared for the clinical and technical questions the boards actually ask. A record that is difficult to attain through marketing is consistently ranking in the top five across several disciplines throughout several exam cycles.

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The college primarily serves students from Mindanao and Davao City, with about 7,000 undergraduates and about 100 graduate students. Beginning in August 2016, it switched to a North American academic calendar, which brought it closer to international healthcare education cycles and made it slightly easier for graduates to transfer and continue their studies elsewhere.

Opened in 2012, the satellite Basic Education campus at Ulas expands the college’s reach into a different area of the city and a different educational level, encompassing students from the foundational years to professional license preparation under one institutional umbrella.

Given how San Pedro College evolved from a hospital annex to a recognized health sciences college, it seems likely that the Dominican Sisters who came to Davao in 1948 had a better idea of what the city would eventually require than anybody could have imagined. A city like Davao City, which is expanding so rapidly, needs a large number of health professionals. Though the institution’s standing in Mindanao is not much in doubt, it is still unclear if the larger Philippine health education system will catch up to what SPC has been doing regionally.