WAG holds Health Day in Mbire District

Women’s Action Group (wag) recently held a Health Day in Mbire District that brought together health and gender-based violence service providers in the district and surrounding areas. During the event, the community had an opportunity to access health services that included HIV counselling and testing, family planning services, blood pressure checks and cervical cancer screening among an array of other services.

For a community that struggles daily to access such services because of its geographical location and the unavailability of these health provisions, people turned up in droves to access different health services.

As early as six in the morning, Mushumbi Business Centre was a hive of activity as people, mainly women arrived in their numbers to join queues and wait for service providers to arrive and kick start the programme.

Although all the health service spots were characterised by long winding queues of people who wanted to access the services, the cancer screening spot recorded the largest turnout of women who wanted to be screened.

Southern Africa is the continent’s worst affected region when it comes to deaths due to cervical cancer, recent studies from the World Health Organisation have shown.

Cervical cancer accounts for one-third of all cancer cases in Zimbabwe and is the leading cause of cancer death among Zimbabwean women.

This high disease burden has been heavily influenced by the HIV epidemic. When women arrive at rural hospitals with invasive, late-stage cervical cancer, little can be done for them. In practical terms, both treatment and palliation are unavailable, and these women usually die of the disease.

According to the Zimbabwe National Cancer Registry about 3,96 million women over 15 years of age in Zimbabwe are at risk of developing cervical cancer. On the global scale, 493 000 new cases of cervical cancer occur annually and 274 000 women die of the disease every year.

For Zimbabwean women, the trials and tribulations of dealing with cancer were supposed to end with the commissioning of free cancer screening machines in most district and provincial hospitals in Zimbabwe nearly two years ago.

However, this has not been the case owing to shortage of machinery to screen the condition in most parts of the country. It therefore did not come as a surprise when a huge number of women joined the long winding queue for cancer screening.

The “see and treat” method — Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid and Cerviography,Viac— as it commonly termed, uses digital camera to take pictures of the cervix, and the results come out within minutes.

Sadly, only 17 women managed to be screened on the day.

However, other health providers reported brisk business and a total of 160 had access to HIV counseling and testing, 150 for high blood pressure and 69 for family planning services.

Commenting on the decision to hold a Health Day, Women’s Action Group director, Mrs Edinah Masiyiwa said the organisation wanted to bring health service providers on the doorstep of people of Mbire, especially women.

“Rural people often experience barriers to health care that limit their ability to get care they need.

“For instance, to have good healthcare access, a rural resident must have financial means to pay for the services, as well as means to use and access the service.

“It was against that background that we decided to organise the Health Day, and afford the residents of Mbire an opportunity to get these health services, which they don’t normally access,” said Mrs Masiyiwa.

She added that lack of healthcare specialised professionals who can use sophisticated equipment was also inhibiting access to healthcare to people in rural areas by limiting the supply of available services.

It becomes difficult for the majority of rural residents — who are usually cash-strapped — to travel long distances to district hospitals to access the services. In this case, Women’s Action Group chose to hold the Health Day in Mbire as a pilot to our community mobilisation work in the H4+ districts.

WAG looks forward to holding a similar day in Chipinge District in 2016.

This article was prepared under the project “UNH4+ Support to Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health” supported by UNAIDS with funding from the Government of Sweden.