‘Be part of Covid-19 response’

and strategise on how best patients can access services and passage at security checkpoints without sharing their medical records to non-medical personnel at the various security checkpoints.

“We need to be guided by the Public Health Act and the Patients Charter on patients’ confidentiality and privacy that clearly states that a patient shall have the right for the details of their medical records to be treated as confidential and ensure reasonable privacy,” said Mr Rusike.

Solutions

Now that there is ample evidence that Covid-19 has penetrated communities and spreading, experts say there is need for health literacy and community participation.

Mr Rusike suggested that intensive awareness campaigns in communities are now critical to ensure that the general public plays an active role in the country’s response to Covid-19.

He said public response to the pandemic is not the responsibility of the health system alone.

“It also calls on public information, availability of safe water, soap, food, job security and social protection and the work of many other sectors.”

Senior Hospital Doctors Association president Dr Shingai Nyaguse called for a solution to the current impasse between healthcare workers and their employer to ensure that the public has access to health services.

“The most urgent thing is to deal with the issue of health workers that has paralysed service delivery, both for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 services,” said Dr Nyaguse.

“Then continue to liaise and inform, take the lead in the Covid-19 response nationally and reassure the citizens of Zimbabwe that the health sector is now geared to meet all their needs.”

Dr Chiwora said the appointment of a substantive minister was welcome.

“We are very happy that we now have a substantive minister and we hope that he will address the issues that are affecting the health delivery system,” he said.

“The health sector is in serious problems. The institutions, both private and public, need to be capacitated in terms of infrastructure, equipment, medicines and laboratory testing kits, and this should be addressed almost immediately.”

Harare City Health Services director Dr Prosper Chonzi said while it may be too late to introduce targeted lockdowns due to the spread of the disease, there was need for Government to realign efforts to ensure that the available resources are channelled to the right areas of response.

“What is more important is for us to go back to the basics of outbreak control. What are the steps in determining how you respond to an outbreak? The first one being establishing the existence of an outbreak, which we have already done.

“We now know that we have a pandemic, we know that people with symptoms are the ones that we refer and these are the ones who should be in community or hospital set-up. We need to use case definition of Covid-19, we do not have to solely depend on testing because our capacity to test is very low.

“Once we do that we stop relying on testing, so we need to use other epidemiological means to identify cases and respond appropriately. We now need to come up with community interventions not laboratory-based,” said Dr Chonzi.

“Once we are able to test everybody, we do that but for now we need to refocus our strategies and align those with our resources and ability to respond.

“It might be a bit too late to do a targeted lockdown because it seems like we now have a huge outbreak across the country. We may need to then look at certain hotspots in certain parts of our district, but that action would need to be backed scientifically,” he said.