Report reveals deterioration of Zim health services
By Alex Bell
A new report by six independent Zimbabwean doctors has revealed the almost total collapse of the country's health services during the past year, in what it has labeled 'an unmitigated tragedy.'
A decade ago, Zimbabwe was considered to have the best health system in sub-Saharan Africa. But with the economic crisis worsening, 10,000 Zimbabwean nurses are employed in Britain alone, and an estimated 80% of Zimbabwean medical graduates now work abroad.
The scale of the political and humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe makes it virtually impossible to estimate how many people have lost their lives as a direct result of the devastating state of medical care. But this latest report has revealed how critical the situation is.
The report said hospital admissions have declined sharply because of the cost of treatment and transportation to clinics, in a situation that the report says was 'scarcely conceivable just a year ago.' The basic costs of medical care are far out of reach for most Zimbabweans, where the majority of monthly salaries cannot buy basic food. The report said: 'Elective surgery has been abandoned in the central hospitals and even emergency surgery is often dependent on the ability of patients' relatives to purchase suture materials from private suppliers.'
According to media reports, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down, X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics and anticonvulsants have run out and emergency resuscitation equipment is not functioning. Patients needing casts for broken bones are reportedly being told to bring their own plaster, and in a country with one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.
The report on the desperate state of the country's health services comes as the ban on humanitarian food aid appears to have finally been lifted. The ban, which has left millions of Zimbabweans facing starvation, has sparked an outcry across the globe as it flew in the face of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the country's political leaders.
The situation saw the Red Cross Federation issue an urgent appeal for donations to distribute immediate aid to the most desperate. The organisation, one of the few that was allowed to continue aid operations, has said the food packages are set to be distributed to almost 300 000 of the country's most desperate people from September as part of a comprehensive 6 month 'recovery' programme.
Matthew Cochrane from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has been touring Zimbabwe to see for himself the extent of the humanitarian crisis. An obviously shaken Cochrane told Newsreel on Monday the "intimate tragedy is overwhelming." He explained that the majority of families he has met so far are unable to purchase food, and expressed shock at the numbers of starving people across the country.
Cochrane added that the international community needs to 'step up' in an effort to solve the crisis, emphasising that "behind the well documented political situation is a very real crisis."