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Thandeka Moyo Chronicle Reporter
ZIMBABWE has made great strides in the health delivery system by constructing more hospitals and clinics as well as destroying barriers that previously kept locals from exclusive “whites only” hospitals before Independence. Health and Child Care Minister Dr David Parirenyatwa commended President Robert Mugabe and his government for improving and transforming the health care sector in the past 35 years.
He said Zimbabwe is among the first developing countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals of treating and preventing new HIV infections and reducing mother to child infections from 22 percent to 18 percent.
“One of our greatest achievements since Independence is that we’ve managed to take health care to the people. We achieved this by building more clinics as well as district, provincial and central hospitals.
“We used to have two central hospitals now we have six. The government has built eight more provincial hospitals compared to the two we had before independence,” said Dr Parirenyatwa.
He said the government had empowered indigenous people by destroying barriers that reduced them to second class citizens before 1980.
“If you go back to the era before independence you’ll discover that there were hospitals for black and white people. Mpilo Central Hospital was for Africans, that’s why its corridors are narrow.
“When we came in as a government, we changed that. The name Parirenyatwa Hospital was given to the then Andrew Fleming Hospital which was built with white people in mind.”
The Minister said the country, which had only 10 district hospitals before independence, now boasts of 52 district hospitals.
He said the immunisation programme was now a priority as opposed to colonial Rhodesia.
“We’re confident to say that not only have we been able to educate our people in terms of health needs, but people now know more about how to prevent certain diseases.” he said.
Dr Parirenyatwa, son to the first black Zimbabwean doctor and national hero, Dr Samuel Parirenyatwa, said the government had led in achieving universal access to ARV and treating HIV which had a very high prevalence rate at one point.
“Look at how we’ve fought HIV. It came in a very strong way, 31 percent prevalence rate in 1999 and now we’re talking of 13 percent.
“We’ve done that because we’re doing prevention, prevention and prevention. We used to deny people ARVs because we were told that ARVs are expensive, now we give ARVs free of charge because we believe that’s the right way to go,” he said.
The Minister said sanitation among Zimbabweans had increased since the attainment of Independence in 1980, which has seen a decrease in people who use the bush to relieve themselves.
“I could go on and on but it’s also important to note that we now have medical schools with black students.
“We only had one medical school that used to take about 15 students and out of those 15 maybe eight would be white. Now we’ve changed all that. We now take 200 students in Harare (University of Zimbabwe) and about 25 students in Bulawayo (National University of Science and Technology).”
He said in spite of such achievements, the government was still looking forward to other milestones.
“I think with those achievements we’re now looking at how we can build another Mpilo Hospital because this is an old hospital, we’re looking at how we can build another Harare hospital.
“We’re looking at how we can make Mpopoma Clinic have more services than it has, we want all our clinics to have X rays instead of coming to Mpilo hospital for X rays.
“We want to decentralise our services as we still want to achieve more in this sector for our people,” said Dr Parirenyatwa.
Online Reporter