Patients transferred from strike-bound hospital

Health authorities, unable to coax striking workers back to the country's biggest hospital, started moving scores of patients to a private facility, AFP reported on Wednesday.

The report said that the strike by more than 500 junior workers at Malawi's Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, which also serves the populous south of the country, had paralysed health services since it began last Saturday. Government officials were quoted as saying that the strike had almost closed the 1,000-bed hospital and could have resulted in the deaths of two patients.

Peter Zinchetera, administrator of the nearby Mlambe hospital, a 254-bed facility run by the Roman Catholic Church, told AFP it had taken in scores of patients but was not yet overstretched. "We will try hard to help them. We won't even ask the government to pay us the bills," Zinchetera was quoted as saying.

The striking healthcare workers wanted professional, housing and duty allowances, backdated to July, to augment their monthly salary of US $40, the report said. It added that workers were striking because the government had not yet implemented a budgeted payout of US $110 in salary increases to its 120,000 civil servants. The increase would have boosted junior medical workers' salaries to about US $77 a month, the report said.