Closure of Mpilo theatre exposes council’s poor response systems

In a period such as this one where the council has enforced water rationing and shedding, residents could have been forgiven for thinking that the lack of water was due to water shedding, though we believe, hospitals are not supposed to be affected by such shedding.

Mpilo Central Hospital, one of the country’s major referral centres, caters for patients from Bulawayo, the Midlands, Masvingo, Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South and once an important section such as the theatre is closed, the impact is felt right across the country.

“The impact was immediately felt at the labour wards where plenty of running water is needed to maintain hygiene. For a hospital like Mpilo, if there is no water for even 30 minutes, we could be talking of a major health disaster because all kinds of diseases are treated here and we need to adhere to a very strict conduct for hygiene to prevent the spread of diseases,” said an official at Mpilo.

This goes to show the importance of having running water at all times in a health institution since a momentary shortage could lead to disease outbreaks. We cannot afford to have that as a city.

Also, many patients, some of them from outside Bulawayo, awaiting operations, have had their procedures rescheduled to next week and it is likely that there will be a ripple effect in that some of the serious cases could take the place of others booked for next week and thus add to the inconvenience to the patients.

While the hospital battles to remedy the situation in terms of attending to the serious cases and ensuring that these could be accommodated at nearby central hospitals where possible to avoid preventable deaths, it is our hope that the city council will also attend to its response systems especially as regards pipe bursts since the current situation is such that a pipe burst can be attended to two weeks after a report has been made.

Council has, in this instance, blamed residents for failing to make a report of the pipe burst. We, however, feel that the attitude of the residents, though it must change, reflects their dejection since it is most likely that previous reports were never attended to on time, if at all they were attended to.

We are not sure if there is a rating regarding the seriousness of the pipe burst or leak, so that when one makes a report it could be treated with a degree of seriousness seeing that a lot of treated water would be going down the drain.

Residents have endured many days without water due to delays in attending to burst pipes while clean water goes down the drain and the situation at Mpilo shows a wider problem within the council that could be related to decreased capacity, whether linked to low staff levels or plain inefficiency.

It is also our hope that the hospital would in the long term have contingency measures in place in the form of a back-up water source in case of council system failure. We do not want to imagine what would happen if the water burst happens in the middle of a long and complicated operation or when many women are delivering in the maternity ward, since unlike operations, labour cannot be postponed.

The situation in Mzilikazi, which affected Mpilo hospital, should serve as a wake-up call to both the council and the hospital on the need to have a proactive approach to some of these challenges so that we reduce the inconvenience to especially our frail clients at hospitals.