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Dr Parirenyatwa

Rules are made for people and not people for rules. This appears to be a statement of the obvious but in some cases there seems to be a preponderance to let rules rule, instead of making them work for the greater good of society.
Such has become the case with the employment of nurses.
The decision to freeze government posts and not employ new people was made in the right spirit but was poorly applied. It never made much sense to maintain a moratorium on the employment of nurses yet the same civil service was happy to take in new teachers, soldiers and police officers all the time.

The same service even made space to take on relief teachers to cover for gaps left by leaves and deaths and is monthly paying allowances for student teachers on attachment. One is left to wonder what intelligence has then informed the freezing of nurse posts over the past five years.

We acknowledge that they are not the only sector hit by the freeze, and we are not underplaying the importance of all the other affected ministries and departments.
But nursing is and should be accorded the status of an essential service. As a nation we are battling HIV and the rise of non-communicable diseases. A holistic approach to the challenges is needed and the deployment of adequate nurses on the ground is a practical starting point.

A visit to any public hospital on any given day will show long queues and many harried and overworked health professionals, mostly nurses — female and male — trying to do the best they can under the circumstances.

There is no question that the institutions are understaffed and all the health practitioners there are overworked. Many horror stories abound of patients dying or taking a turn for the worse while in queues waiting for medical attention. It is tragic that the citizens in the low income brackets who make up the majority of the population have come to accept slow and inadequate service at clinics and hospitals as the norm, rather than the exception.

The picture is worsened by the fact that nurse training institutions are churning out more than 500 graduates each year.
The announcement by Minister of Health and Child Care, Dr David Parirenyatwa, that a lifting of the freeze on nursing post is imminent in a move that will see 2 400 new nurses employed, is a move in the right direction.

But we hope that this time we are going beyond intent to reach action.
And we would like to urge the State not to make this another once-off exception but a continuous exercise whereby any vacancies created by resignations, retirements and death are immediately filled up. A previous lift of the five-year freeze saw about 1 000 nurses being absorbed into the public health sector. But the move left over 2 000 others in the cold with many institutions still understaffed. While we are cognisant of the need to control public spending being one of the key principles of Zim-Asset, we would like to point out that the employment of strategic personnel is an equally important pillar in delivery.

There are other areas like foreign trips and allowances where Government can save money, instead of keeping nursing posts vacant. Global access to quality health care is a basic human right and should not be a preserve of the elite. Poverty and ignorance already seriously compromise the marginalised populace and Government has been abetting the situation by denying them easy access to health care.

The resultant lack of confidence in the conventional health sector has seen many people turn to alternatives in desperation. This has left the many vulnerable to fleecing by everyone from religious con-artists peddling miracle cure-alls and importers of dubious and exorbitant snake oils that are touted as being more effective than conventional medicines.
We hope the relevant stakeholders will act swiftly to convert this intention into action.