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Mukudzei Chingwere in Montreux, Switzerland
Zimbabwe will this week participate at the fifth edition of the Patient Safety Global Ministerial Summit in the city of Montreux in Switzerland with Vice President and Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Constantino Chiwenga scheduled to lead Zimbabwe’s delegation.
The summit aims to converge a global response to patient safety particularly the need to ensure that sick people are not exposed to new infections after checking in at a health facility or hospital.
It is also the first edition being held post the Covid-19 pandemic and comes at a time when global health leaders have conceded the fragility and inadequacies of health facilities, both in the developed and developing world, as brutally laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Zimbabwe’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other international organisations based in Geneva, Ambassador Stuart Comberbach, confirmed Zimbabwe’s participation.
“It’s an important conference; it is an important visit and it’s important that the Honourable Vice President (Dr Chiwenga) received an invitation from the President of the Swiss Confederation to attend this particular conference on patient safety,” Ambassador Comberbach told journalists here.
“This is a conference which will bring together, we are told 81 delegations have registered to participate in the conference, including many from Africa.
“It comes at a very important time for global healthcare issues because of the Covid-19 pandemic really showed the extent which the global health community is not adequately prepared for handling medical or health emergencies of the scale that we saw with Covid-19.
“So, patient safety is very much a part of the response to Covid-19. It’s an issue which has been flagged a long time ago by the World Health Organisation, by the United Nations in general,” he said.
This year’s edition comes at a time when Zimbabwe’s healthcare is being revamped to align with Vision 2030 of an upper middle-income society as enunciated by President Mnangangwa. Under the healthcare cluster, President Mnangagwa envisions universal health access of sufficient quality to the populace.
It is a journey on which Zimbabwe is well on course and has lately earned global commendation for the manner in which it is managing its health services.
Online Reporter