Health services paralysed as nurses' strike continues

Services in public hospitals across Burundi continued to be paralysed as an indefinite strike by nurses entered its fifth day on Friday. The nurses are demanding better pay and working conditions. Although nurses have been reporting for duty at most hospitals in Bujumbura, Burundi's capital, they have not been working as normal. "We are working as we would on weekends or on holidays," Melance Hakizimana, chairman of the nurses' trade union, le Syndicat National de Travailleurs de la Sante, told IRIN on Wednesday. This has amounted to providing emergency services such as delivering babies, treating road accident victims and the very ill, as well as patients already admitted to the hospitals. "For other routine consultations, patients are not admitted, otherwise our strike would have no meaning," Hakizimana said. However, some of these emergency services were not being offered in a few hospitals, such as Prince Regent Charles and Clinique Prince Louis, both in Bujumbura. The director of Prince Regent Charles, Dr Ignace Nzotungwanayo, said that although laboratory services were supposed to run all day and all night, this was not the case, "putting doctors and hospitalised patients in an awkward position". One patient said, "I was asked to do a blood test since Monday - I am still waiting." The nurses' action has proved particularly difficult for outpatients; even when doctors were available to treat them, nurses have not been available to assist. Four women who took their children for consultation on Thursday told IRIN they had been to two hospitals, but failed to get any help. They said they were told that only severe cases, or those requiring immediate admission to hospital, were being treated. By Thursday, long queues of outpatients in some hospitals had reduced after many patients gave up. Those who could afford to go to private clinics were beginning to resort to them. The strike began on Monday, with the nurses demanding the implementation of an agreement the Burundian government signed with their union in December 2004, which acknowledges their demands. However, in a report from the Council of Ministers on Wednesday, government spokesman Onésime Nduwimana denied there had been an accord with the nurses' trade union. "Negotiations between nurses' trade unions and the government delegates last year only came up with two proposals on the improvement of nurses' conditions," he said. Nduwimana added, "We only agreed to offer them an easy access to medical care, but for other allowances, it will be analysed for all civil servants altogether." The spokesman called on the nurses to either resume work or resign. But nurses have maintained that they would only resume when the agreement was fully implemented.