Chronicle Editor
Yoliswa Dube-Moyo, Matabeleland South Bureau Chief
THE flight of health workers from the country is affecting the Covid-19 vaccination campaign in Matabeleland South Province as the teams are too lean to sustain door-to-door inoculations in addition to the usual outreach programmes.
A brain drain is reported to be depleting frontline health workers with the country’s hospitals and clinics losing nurses and doctors to overseas countries such as Britain.
In an effort to reach herd immunity, health officials across the country have had to embark on door-to-door vaccination drives in order to access more people.
The country had aimed to reach herd immunity, which is 60 percent of the targeted population, by the end of last year but failed to reach the goal due to low uptake of the vaccines in some areas among other reasons.
Matabeleland South provincial medical director Dr Rudo Chikodzore said human resources have been a major challenge for the vaccination drives in the province.
“We had actually discussed door-to-door vaccinations with the district medical officers some two or so weeks back and some had said they would start doing them. I had requested for feedback on how many had started and how they were going.
One of our major challenges is human resources for us to be able to do door-to-door vaccinations plus the usual outreach campaigns. Remember, Bulawayo is a metropolitan city and we are a rural province.
Our reach is much bigger so when you compare one of our districts and Bulawayo province, it might almost be the same. We’re already challenged with human resources with quite a huge number of our staff having left. This has affected our vaccination campaigns generally,” said Dr Chikodzore.
She said the teams were working hard to reach their goals despite the limitations.
“We’ve tried to work with what we have. We’ve also tried to get the hard-to-reach areas covered while at the same time conducting door-to-door campaigns. It has been a struggle for us but we had asked the teams to start doing door-to-door vaccinations. It might actually work better in an urban set up versus a rural set up because of human resources issues.
Some of our trained and experienced staff who knew how to manage Covid-19 and had trained on how to do vaccinations have left. Where we had 10 staff, for example, we’re left with two,” said Dr Chikodzore.
The human resource challenges, she said, were limiting the reach of the vaccination campaign in the province.
“In terms of doing door-to-door vaccinations, you’ll find that it will mean a team will need to go because there are issues of someone who’ll need to do the vaccination, someone will need to do the recording, so to have teams doing door-to-door while we’re missing out on the outreach is a challenge.
Remember, we also have hard-to-reach rural areas that also need to be covered; people who have not even accessed the first dose,” said Dr Chikodzore.
She said while the vaccination teams had started door-to-door campaigns, not all districts in the province were on board.
“The teams have started but it’s not all the districts. It’s based on the human resources they have at the moment,” said Dr Chikodzore.
The country has predominantly used Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines in its vaccination campaign.
According to the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Zimbabwe had 228 254 confirmed Covid-19 cases including 213 299 recoveries and 5 294 deaths as at January 23. To date, a total of 4 242 371 people have been vaccinated against Covid-19.
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