Financial Gazette (Harare)
Synodia Bhasera
11 October 2008
Harare — THE School of Nursing at Parirenyatwa Hospital might discontinue some training programmes unless it accesses the necessary financial support, The Financial Gazette heard this week.
The school is the only health facility still offering specialist training in anaesthetics, operating theatre, intensive care and ophthalmic nursing. After years of under-funding, it is now feared that the school could halt some of these essential training programmes, further worsening the parlous state of the country's health sector.
"If adequate support is not given to the Parirenyatwa School of Nursing, we may also find ourselves in a situation where the school is forced to discontinue some of the on-going training programmes as has already happened elsewhere," Thomas Zigora, the chief executive officer of the Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals said.
Zigora said a decision is still to be made on which training programmes to suspend.
He said: "That decision has not yet been reached, but will be made if the problem persists. For instance, if we are running intensive care or anesthetics programmes and we don't have equipment, how do we train? We want constant support in these areas so that we continue with the training."
The health sector in Zimbabwe has been hardest hit by the country's economic meltdown that has invented serious shortages of foreign currency required to import drugs and replace ageing equipment.
Zimbabwe had one of the best health systems in southern Africa but the sector gradually unraveled as the economy deteriorated over the past decade.
Low salaries have combined with acute material shortages to demoralise staff despite the fact that the Health Ministry has been routinely given the largest budget allocation every financial year since independence in 1980.
Most health professionals have left the country in search of better paying jobs abroad. More than 10 000 Zimbabwean nurses are employed in Britain alone while 80 percent of medical graduates who have fled the disintegrating economy are working in other foreign countries.
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