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Zimbabwe suffers in silence as hospital system fails

The advice of doctors to Zimbabweans is: Don’t get sick. If you do, don’t count on hospitals — they are short of drugs and functioning equipment.

As the economy collapses, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down. X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics and anticonvulsants have run out.

Emergency resuscitation equipment is out of action. Patients needing casts for broken bones need to bring their own plaster. In a country with one of the world’s worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.

Health authorities blame Western sanctions imposed to end political and human rights abuses under Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

The economic meltdown is evident in hospitals, where elevators don’t work and patients are carried in makeshift hammocks of torn sheets and blankets.

Jacob Kwaramba, an insurance clerk, brought his brother to Harare’s Parirenyatwa hospital, once the pride of health services in southern Africa. Emergency room doctors sent Kwaramba to a private pharmacy to buy drugs for his brother’s lung infection. He returned two hours later to find his brother dead.

“I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a fatal illness,” he said.

Another family said a relative dying of cancer was sent home and no painkillers could be found in pharmacies. Relatives abroad were able to pay for morphine, but by the time import clearance was obtained, the man had died in agony, the family said.

A report by six Zimbabwean doctors details the collapse.

“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,” it said.

“Pharmacies stand empty and ambulances immobilized for want of spare parts ... this is an unmitigated tragedy, scarcely conceivable just a year ago,” it said.

The doctors who compiled the report for circulation among aid and development groups withheld their names for fear of reprisal.

Political violence has added to the burden. Amnesty International said hospitals ran out of crutches for victims of attacks blamed on Mugabe’s forces.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, an alliance of human rights campaigners, said medical staff were chased from rural clinics to keep them from helping injured opposition supporters, while many city hospitals couldn’t cope with the number of injuries in beatings and torture blamed on Mugabe’s party, police and soldiers.

The report said that a decade ago Zimbabwe had the best health system in sub-Saharan Africa. But with the crisis worsening, 10,000 Zimbabwean nurses are employed in Britain alone and 80 percent of Zimbabwean medical graduates work abroad.

The elite go for care abroad, mostly to South Africa, but also to Asia. Mugabe has his checkups in Malaysia.
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