BY NOKUTHABA DLAMINI
Zimbabwe’s Health and Child Care ministry is facing a severe brain drain, with a significant number of healthcare workers, including oncologists, renal specialists, surgical doctors, nurse tutors, and Intensive Care Unit nurses, leaving the country at an alarming rate.
According to Maxwell Hove, Chief Services Director in the ministry, the primary cause of this exodus is poor remuneration due to the country’s economic situation, which has resulted in wages that are too low to sustain healthcare workers, migrating to neighboring and the European countries.
“I might also want to say that prior to the Covid-19 pandemic in this country, we had an excess of nursing staff,” he revealed.
“We had nurses who were sitting at home, unemployed, but after the Covid-19 pandemic, we suddenly had a vacuum where all our nurses had been attracted to greener pastures and we are now face to face with the shortage of nurses, especially the shortage of specialists nurses like those in intensive care unit, those in anesthesia, those who provide oncology, renal services and so forth,” he said.
“Even the tutors, those who are supposed to be teaching others to be nurses, we now have a shortage of those because they have either been attracted to those greener pastures or some of them have retired, these are real issues,” he added.
Hove noted that the shortage extends beyond nurses to include doctors, laboratory scientists, and specialists who have also migrated to other countries for better opportunities.
When asked about the percentage shortage ratio, Hove responded, “Well, when the World Health Organization, which does the monitoring of these ratios, on the 23rd of March 2023, WHO came to the ministry and said your index had fallen below 50 percent per 10 000, that is healthcare workers, and on that basis, they then put Zimbabwe on the red list, and what that red list means is that other member states, countries in the WHO, are no longer allowed to recruit healthcare workers from Zimbabwe because we have fallen.”
Hove attributed this crisis to years of economic sanctions and isolation, which have limited Zimbabwe’s access to international finance institutions.
“You are all aware that Zimbabwe has been operating what others may call restrictive measures, but in reality, they are economic sanctions, and because of that, it meant that our ability to, as an economy, to be able to function, accessing lines of credit from international finance institutions like IMF, World Bank, was quite limited, and that would also affect our balance of payments, so this is the source of the shortages of foreign currency that we have witnessed in the economy.”
To address this crisis, Hove said the establishment of the Health Service Commission is seized with the matters, and they are doing all they can to ensure they improve the working conditions of healthcare professionals, both monetarily and non-monetarily.
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