Chronicle Editor
Johnsias Muonhori, [email protected]
THE Ministry of Healthy and child care in the Midlands province has come up with a strategic roadmap to bring healthy services to patients’ door steps, to scale up access to health services in the communities.
The new strategy entails that patients in all corners of the province will have their chance to be attended by doctors and specialists who will visit community healthy facilities on a monthly basis.
Mobile teams from local clinics will also conduct regular outreaches in their communities to attend to patients in the furthest distances from health centers, to reduce travelling costs to ordinary citizens.
Kwekwe and Gokwe South has been scheduled as the first two districts to benefit from the programme as well as a sample to test the viability of the new strategy.
Speaking during a provincial stakeholder sensitization meeting in Gweru yesterday, Provincial health promotion officer Mr Ishmael Mavhenyengwa said, they considered the new strategy in a bid to heighten access to health services to communities as well as cutting travelling costs on the part of patients.
“We have come up with a new strategy to increase the access to health services in our communities which is in line with the devolution agenda and National Development Strategy 1 which speaks of decentralisation and universal access to health services.
“The plan is, each clinic in all districts across the province must arrange a mobile team for regular outreach to attend to patients in all corners and identify those who may need doctor’s attention.
“Doctors from districts would also be scheduled for the second phase of outreach, where they will visit each clinic on a monthly basis to attend to patients identified by mobile teams,” he said.
Mr Mavhenyengwa said they realised that there are also a lot of cases of patients failing to access healthcare in the Zimbabwean communities due to lack of specialist medical attention, hence informing the decision to schedule specialist outreach.
“As you know, some patients in the peripheries of communities fail to get access to medical specialists, doctors outreach would also help to identify these patients so that we schedule another round of specialists to attend these patients.
“If needed, ambulances from districts would be used to ferry patients with special cases, for instance those who may need to go under operation,” he said.
The new strategy will also integrate other Government departments that work with communities as a way of reducing operation costs.
“We are going to incorporate other Government departments such as National Aids Council, Agriculture and all other sectors that deal directly with the wellbeing of the people so that we can lessen costs.
“We realised that it may be cost effective if we can combine teams with other departments that we share similar goals with, for instance NAC, so that we help each other in terms of transport as well as sharing information.
The Second Republic prioritised access to health services, which saw construction of health posts in the margins of rural and peri-urban communities through devolution funds.
In the past years, people had to travel long distances to see medical specialists, a condition that led to some ordinary citizens dying in their homes.
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