Hospitals hit hard by strike

Mbulawa Shiri grimaced on Thursday as he lay on a hospital bed at Parirenyatwa Hospital, Zimbabwe's largest referal 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 Zim $2 million (US $2,400 at the official rate, US $400 on the black market) to send him to a private hospital. Zimbabwe's doctors went on strike on Thursday last week, demanding salaries of Zim $30 million a month (US $36,000 at the official rate and $6,000 at the black market rate) - a collosal increase from their current Zim $4 million to Zim $5 million (US $6,000/US $1,000) a year. The doctors argue that such a hike was needed to keep pace with inflation in a country where the black market sets the real cost of living. 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 Zim $260,000 to Zim $800,000 a month depending on their posts. 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. 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. 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. Spanish-speaking Cuban doctors and their French-speaking counterparts from the Democratic Republic of Congo are also battling to attend to the few emmergency cases which are being admitted," she added. 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 emmergency 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.