Zimbabwe health descends to new lows
■ Surgeries with bare hands, machines defunct, ropes used for bandage
Harare, Zimbabwe, Jan. 12: A doctors’ strike in Zimbabwe has crippled a health system that was already in intensive care from neglect. It mirrors the state of affairs in a country that was full of promise a year ago with the departure of longtime leader Robert Mugabe but now faces economic collapse.
Doctors describe grim conditions: Bare-handed surgeries. Plastic bread bags used to collect patients’ urine. Broken-down machines.
Zimbabwe’s health sector, once considered one of the best in Africa, is on its knees. “It’s so sad. The hospitals are empty, the patients are being turned away to die somewhere else,” said Prince Butau, treasurer of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association, which represents about 1,000 doctors
who anchor government hospitals.
A new president’s promises of change have turned out to be empty. “Affordable quality health care guaranteed,” read campaign billboards for President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a former Mugabe protege, ahead of the July 2018 election. Six months after he
narrowly won the disputed vote, Zimbabwe’s health sector has widespread shortages of basic medicines such as painkillers and contraceptives.
Mnangagwa and others in the country’s political and economic elite receive medical care mainly in neighbouring South Africa, while Mugabe frequently visits Singapore for treatment.
At home, everyday Zimbabweans seeking health care have had to bring their own drugs, syringes, bandages and, at times, water.
Government hospitals were paralysed by the fiveweek doctors’ strike that “begrudgingly” sputtered to an end on Thursday with no resolution for their demands. The end brings no improvement in conditions.
In November, the Zimbabwe Medical Association, that represents health workers, warned that patients were “relapsing” and “deteriorating” while operations were being cancelled due to shortages of medicines.
The situation, coupled with low salaries, forced doctors to strike, Butau said.
Without adequate gloves, doctors sometimes use their bare hands while masks and goggles are nonexistent, he said. “We are exposed to fluids, blood spillage, HIV and hepatitis B.” He has seen rope used in place of bandages. “We cannot keep on doing that,” he said.
One of the striking doctors, Wallace Hlambelo, described using everyday plastic bags with catheters for some elderly patients. “What we were doing was not to treat patients. Patients feel you have done something but you would have done nothing. That’s not medicine,” he said.
Early this month, Mnangagwa cut short his annual leave to help resolve the doctors’ strike. The problem may widen after the Apex Council, which represents all government workers, on Tuesday gave notice to strike if salaries are not paid in US dollars.