Of Fired Doctors: Shame on our Health Sector!

Staff Reporter

Improving the quality of care provided by the Zimbabwean Healthcare System is marred  by failure to appreciate and realise the impact of remuneration for health workers such as doctors and nurses, and being militant when dealing with their grievances simply affects the vulnerable citizens who cannot afford expensive private medical care, and is ultimately an abuse of human rights for citizens. 

Lately the government of Zimbabwe has been up in arms with the doctors who have been striving because of poor remuneration and their inability to afford expenses to come to work.  The doctors have been requesting, asking for and demanding better remuneration, resources that would make it possible of them to come to work. 

In its response, the government issued ultimatums but to no vail as they kept on absenting themselves and finally implemented discharge of the doctors from their duties. Atleast 77 doctors are reported to have been fired out of 80 doctors who were scheduled for disciplinary hearings.

Health Service Board chairperson Doctor Paulinus Sikosana,  commented that the firing of the doctors was done as per Zimbabwean labor laws as some striking junior, middle level and senior doctors refused to attend hearing convened by the ministry of health which sort to have them appear before a disciplinary committee.

However, the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association later said that the Health Service Board (HSB) which hires doctors on behalf of the government misfired when it dismissed 77 striking doctors.

“HSB has succeeded in shooting themselves on the foot. Whilst the Zimbabwean citizens and the government of Zimbabwe have entrusted them with a simple mandate of resolving the crisis in our healthcare system, they have shaken the nation by firing the very few doctors in the country.

“This shocking decision shows clearly that they don’t care about the suffering masses of our people and the ordinary citizens who rely on government hospitals for healthcare. Once again we reiterate that ZHDA and its entire membership will not be intimidated or deterred in asking for a liveable wage and in doing so we maintain that we have not committee any crime by being broke,” said the doctors.

The citizens at the end are being used as collateral damage as reports said that since the dismissal of doctors by government, expecting mothers from different suburbs in Harare have been shuttling from one clinic to another in search of functioning maternity facilities but to no avail, and in this case it is neither the doctors who are suffering nor the government but the citizens, especially women who are expecting and their families who loose their loved ones through maternal mortality. 

The Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe recently staged a march to protest the poor services women and girls are receiving in this failing health system where they are dying giving birth for various reasons chief among them, poorly motivated staff and poor resources in the health system. 

What makes the Zimbabwean situation the most painful in that the leaders cannot stand the national health system and they can afford to charter planes to go outside the country to access health facilities. 

The women in need of Caesarian section, those who are contributing to the sustaining of the national population who give birth to the work force, the community members are dying while they are providing this national service of child birth.

While Government is not paying doctors what they believe they deserve, and while it is also reacting with a militant and unsympathetic manner to the doctors requests, those who are suffering are the poor. When a government fails to manage its staff and meet them at their point of needs in a professional and objective manner, it is a failure in governance terms,  and is a recipe for disaster, and the citizens deserve accountability from such a government to which it installed into power.

The government reacting in this manner simply becomes a training ground for other nations to easily benefit from the expertise of our doctors who are obviously migrating to other countries that better appreciates them and treats them right, again a loss for this country and a failure to manage the critical component of this country’s factors of production that is the human capita in the health sector.