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Rejoice Makoni-Herald Correspondent
RUSSIA is committed to enhancing cooperation with Zimbabwe in the health sector by among other programmes training the country’s medical personnel, Russian Ambassador to Zimbabwe Mr Nikolai Krasilnikov has said.
Yesterday Ambassador Krasilnikov paid a courtesy call to Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Douglas Mombeshora at his Harare offices and reaffirmed his country’s commitment to continued cooperation with Zimbabwe.
Speaking to journalists after a closed door meeting with Dr Mombershora, Amb Krasilinikov said Zimbabwe and Russia have excellent relations.
“Today we had a constructive discussion with the Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Mombeshora and I had an opportunity to confirm Russia’s commitment to enhance cooperation with Zimbabwe in the field of health care including training of personnel in the pharmaceutical and epidemiology sector.
“One of the areas of cooperation that was of interest is the proposal by Russian Federal Services for epidemiology protection to launch a programme to assist African countries in particular Zimbabwe in securing sanitary and epidemiology wellbeing to prevent and control infectious diseases.
“This programme follows decisions taken from the Second Russia Africa Summit held in July this year. The programme consists of various components of scientific and practical cooperation including training of specialists on various professional development programmes,” said Amb Krasilinikov
Dr Mombeshora said the training programmes will strengthen the country’s health sector and help improve service delivery as well as patient management.
“The Russian ambassador came up with a proposal to train some of our medical personnel in various fields including medical specialists, undergraduates and laboratory technicians. We have faced a lot of attrition in our staff and we need to increase our training to boost our medical staff. We may not be able to train enough in a short time but if we work together we will make sure that our vacancies are filled.
“We touched on areas of cooperation in the medical field but as you know Russia has been our friend since the liberation struggle. This year we are going to see more Zimbabwe, Russia cooperation in the health sector. We also discussed how we can set up a manufacturing plant for vaccines and other pharmaceutical products. During Covid-19 we benefited from Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, so we are going to learn from them.”
Zimbabwe and Russia share a long historical bond dating back to the liberation struggle and since then, the two nations have cooperated on a wide range of issues on the international stage.
Online Reporter