Staff writer
Community Working Group on Health (CWGH) executive director , Itai Rusike has urged government to adress ‘glaring’ challenges affecting the nursing staff morale ,resulting in massive exodus of highly trained personnel to greener pastures.
“The Health Services Commission must address the glaring management and governance issues in health, and ensure that the employer of choice for all health workers is central government as was the case in the past.
” Managing a professional workforce requires technical skill and capacity, but also human traits and compassion that we find missing in the public health sector,”said Rusike.
He added:
” This largely accounts for the mass exodus of our highly trained health workers to offer their young productive lives elsewhere.
Furthermore, these workers require the tools of the trade, which in turn must be effectively and efficiently managed, be they infrastructure, medicines, equipment, ambulances, service vehicles, and new technologies to make their work less tedious and in line with current best practices than it currently is”.
Rusike said government should also address the issue of poor salaries, poor working conditions and shortages of drugs in hospitals.
“Poor salaries and working conditions in the public health sector discourage health workers and cause many to leave.
The shortage of drugs and equipment is also a problem. Drug shortages first occurred at central hospitals in 1994 and sometimes reached crisis proportions, with patients going for days without proper treatment and this is very demoralising for the staff,” he said.
“The combination of limited resources, increasing stress and reduced salaries is an inflammatory one. In the absence of a good industrial relations system, this has been met with patience by the workforce but that patience is limited as the recent strike action by the nurses demonstrated.
“Health workers are caught in the middle of a system that is slow to respond to their needs and ethical pressures not to take collective job action.
Health workers accept that they should not put their patients at risk by engaging in industrial action, but they also feel very strongly that there must be speedy, fair and impartial procedures for resolving disputes. Long- standing grievances simply should not be allowed to build up.”
Communities feel that Zimbabwe can afford to do better for its people’s health. Countries like Cuba with a per capita national income not much higher than Zimbabwe’s have less than a tenth of the infants dying in the first year of life, and a population whose average life expectancy is 30 years more than Zimbabwe. “