According to him, SADC countries could start in Zimbabwe before going to, say, Canada for medical attention. A few weeks later, the Ebola virus started ravaging West Africa and slowly making its way south. With reports of a case detected in DRC, Zimbabwe started to tighten its borders. During a Parliamentary session the minister was grilled on why it was necessary to tighten our borders. He explained that if Ebola made its way into the country we would not have the capacity to contain it. He was right about Ebola and definitely not right about medical tourism.
Here are some reasons why Zimbabwe is not ready for medical tourism…or Ebola:
Expensive
Sixty % of our population lives in the rural areas where there is very limited access to basic healthcare. In this day and age there are still people in Zimbabwe who can’t go to the hospital or clinic simply because it is too far. A healthcare system that cannot provide basic care such as contraception and immunization to so many of the country’s people is not ready to render expert medical services to the region or tackle a deadly virus.
And if one thinks basic health services accessibility is terrible, I would like to assure them that the specialist services are worse. Paediatrics, histopathology, dialysis and a host of other really important services are so centralized that by the time that less privileged person who lives up to 600km out of Harare gets to them it is usually too late.
Healthcare is expensive, that’s a cold hard fact. The technology costs money, training health care providers is both costly and time consuming, reagents, drugs and administration all need money, and usually in the lump sums. The problem is, who will pay for it? Being sick is expensive and in a lot of cases the patient feels the blow without government subsidies cushioning them.
The price of blood went up at the beginning of this year partly because the government was failing to honour its pledge to subsidise and NABSZ simply couldn’t afford to produce clean, safe blood any more. One of reasons why Zimbabwe has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world is because our expecting mothers simply cannot afford antenatal care.
Temba Mliswa was heard on radio saying that no one complains when 90% of health sector funding comes from the American Embassy. In a different context from that in which he said it, I actually agree with him. Even with so much help from outside, the country simply cannot afford to take care of its people’s health and the people cannot afford it either. I doubt it can afford to take care of the region’s health or add Ebola to its already long to-do list.
The health professionals in this country are generally disgruntled and dissatisfied. The hours are often long, the money not as “long”, the conditions pathetic and the unions useless. Like in every other sector in the country, corruption and victimization are widespread. Sexual harassment is often an occupational hazard and the ambiguity of the law coupled with broken or barely-existent structures to deal with such leave a lot of workers vulnerable.
Workforce
A lot of the health facilities are under-staffed, piling a lot of work onto the few who do have jobs (yes, a number of health professionals are unemployed and we still blame everything on brain-drain). This is one group of people for whom the grass is almost definitely greener on the other side regardless of where the other side is. Asking these people to risk their lives caring for Ebola patients would be more than unreasonable and I am sure they would scoff at the “Medical Tourism” idea – all with good reason.
I just pray that we do not have to deal with Ebola because we are already having a hard time dealing with everything else. The prevalence of HIV went up a bit last year (it is now at 15%), so much for circumcision. If cholera, which can be prevented by basic things like hand washing, and treated using oral rehydration killed so many, I shudder to think what Ebola, which has no known treatment or vaccination, would do. Perhaps we ought to forget about tourism for a minute and try to put our house in order first.
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Post published in: Analysis