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| Africa: Southern |
| Socialist Cuban Scaps held break Doctor/Nurse Strike in Zim |
| 2003-10-31 |
| EFL "Spanish-speaking Cuban doctors and their French-speaking counterparts from the Democratic Republic of Congo are also battling to attend to the few emergency cases which are being admitted" Hey, whatever happened to workers of the world unite? Aren’t these Cuban guys supposed to be providing universal health care in teh slums of Venezuala? Harare - Mbulawa Shiri grimaced on Thursday as he lay on a hospital bed at Parirenyatwa Hospital, Zimbabwe’s largest referral health facility. He was involved in a car accident on Sunday and thinks he broke both his legs. He did not know for sure, because a strike by doctors meant he had not been attended to and his relatives were frantically trying to raise Z$2 million (US $2,400 at the official rate, US $400 on the black market) to send him to a private hospital. Mr. Shiri, do you understand the acronym SOL? On Monday the doctors were joined on strike by nurses, who demanded a review of their salaries. They were left out of a recently concluded Public Service Commission job evaluation exercise which sought to match professionals’ salaries with their qualifications, work load and experience. Nurses earn between Z$260,000 to Z$800,000 a month depending on their posts. Bob has made nurses into millionaires. He is a genius. I bet the teachers are millionaires in Zimbabwe also. Finally, somebody got it right. Hospitals Doctors Association president Phibion Manyanga, who spent the whole of Tuesday locked in a meeting with health minister David Parirenyatwa, said the health professionals were ready to return to work, but only if they received a written government assurance that they would be awarded the salary rise. I don’t think they can provide written assurance of anything as their national paper industry has other priorities - 24 seven rolling out the dough. This is at least the third time this year doctors have gone on strike over pay. Parirenyatwa reportedly said the government could not afford the "unrealistic, black market salaries" demanded by the medical staff, and responded to the strike on Wednesday by ordering doctors and nurses from the uniformed service into the public hospitals. "We are certainly putting up emergency measures in place to take care of the situation. This is our country and these are our people who are suffering," Parirenyatwa told the Bulawayo Chronicle. I wonder if faced with this situation in NKwhether the patients would be inspired by Juche and begin to perform surgeries on each other. However, a nurse at Parirenyatwa Hospital, who asked not to be named, told IRIN that the presence of military medical personnel had made little impact. "The armed forces, like the government, does not have a full complement of medical teams and we have seen only one or two nurses from the army," said the nurse. "The only people who have been of assistance are student nurses and senior nursing staff who are not allowed to go on strike. When you cross a Zimbabwe nurses’ picket line, it sucks. They shout embarassing tidbits from the chart of your last physical. Public relations manager at Parirenyatwa Hospital, Jane Dadzi, confirmed that only senior nursing students and nurse aides were attending to patients. "We have one doctor at the casualty department who is attending to emergency cases. Some people visiting the outpatients department are being turned away as they all cannot be attended to by the staff present because of the strike by doctors and nurses," she told the state-controlled Herald newspaper. Zimbabwe’s health service, once among the best in the region, has been laid low by the country’s deep economic crisis, which has robbed it of adequate funding and experienced personnel. You know you’re in bad shape when the Congo shows up to help. If you’re worse off than the DCR, you havn’t hit rock bottom, but your nudging Haiti out of the way, |
| Posted by:Super Hose |