Zimbabwe: No Money For Health Care

With poverty on the rise and a drought compounding Zimbabwe’s problems, people are struggling to make ends meet, church workers said. In Zimbabwe’s hospitals and other health facilities, “patients need to pay for everything: painkillers, drips, injections and scans,” said Getrude Chimange, coordinator of the justice and peace commission in Mutare Diocese. “Industries have closed, leading to breadwinners losing their jobs and turning to informal trade on the streets, where they make very little money,” she said on Jan. 27 by telephone from Mutare. “A stay in a general hospital in Manicaland province costs $9 a day,” Chimange said, noting that “the doctor or nurse gives the prescription and the patient needs to fill it at a pharmacy.” Some patients “delay going to get the prescribed medication or having X-rays done for more than two weeks because they cannot afford it,” she said. “Lives are lost this way. There are people who die on hospital operating tables when the electricity shuts down,” Chimange said.