SOME private and public hospitals in the country have been accused of not providing the Government with Covid-19 statistics, a move that the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on health described as scandalous and unacceptable.
The development has irked stakeholders who felt that the
country has been missing important information on Covid-19 trends, resulting in
failure to adequately plan in terms of resource mobilisation. Giving oral
evidence on Covid-19 last week before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on
health, head of Monitoring and Evaluation in the Ministry of Health and Child
Care Dr Robert Mudyiradima and the Director of Epidemiology and Disease Control
Dr Portia Manangazira, said private hospitals such as Mater Dei Hospital in
Bulawayo and some in Harare have not been providing data in relation to
Covid-19 statistics.
Chairperson of the committee Dr Ruth Labode said it was
unacceptable for private hospitals to “play such games and try to be a law unto
themselves”. She said the stance by some hospitals and clinics has led to
possible under-reporting of the Covid-19 situation in Zimbabwe and called on
the Government to whip them into line.
“We contacted Mater Dei Hospital after the meeting and they
actually had 17 Covid-19 cases and we wondered where they had come from as we
were told they had said they have zero cases. That hospital has never had zero
cases, where do you think the who is who of Bulawayo go and seek treatment
from?
“This also means two things, it’s either Dr Manangazira did
not phone the hospital or Mater Dei does not respect the Government. As a
private institution they should not question who is Government to ask them
(about statistics).
This is an infectious disease that they must report. The
Government has the right to ask how many patients are at the hospital,” she
said. She added that she was worried because Mater Dei was a Covid-19 testing
centre.
“I was tested there myself but I don’t know if that
information was then taken to the Government. It is possible that information
is under-reported on Covid-19 because if you see an institution saying they
have zero cases when asked for statistics it means they do not want to report,
there cannot be zero cases at an institution,” she said.
Dr Labode also took a swipe at the Bulawayo City Council
for the manner they handled their Covid-19 statistics.
“We were also told that Thorngrove Infectious Disease
Hospital had no Covid-19 patients and later on the Bulawayo City Council
Director of Health Services Dr Edwin Sibanda said there were three cases. For
me it was shocking, it’s just that we cannot come out and verify physically in
the communities, but how can they report such few cases when we are saying
Covid-19 is at its peak in the country?
Many patients are in their homes, the ministry told us that
they have 105 cases (25 January) that are in hospital beds and yet people who
are active with the virus are 7000 plus. So where are these 7000 people? This
means that these people are either being sent away from hospitals or they do
not have money to pay for services for admissions,” she lamented.
Dr Labode also said her committee was told that people were
failing to get help from local clinics and testing centres. “I am also informed
that there are centres like Pumula, Magwegwe and Emakhandeni that are supposed
to be testing people for Covid-19 but when people go and seek services, they
are told there are no test kits. This is a challenge,” she said.
Efforts to get a comment form Mater Dei Hospital
administrator Sister Maureen Jamieson were fruitless as she was said to be off
duty and the mobile number availed to this reporter was unreachable. Messages
sent to the number were not responded to.
In an interview yesterday, Dr Manangazira said private and
public institutions were both found wanting.
“There is underreporting in general across board even in
our own institutions and yet we would want our reporting to reflect the
national picture of Covid-19. At times there are delays, maybe the five cases
that will have been taken today are reported late. Sometimes it’s a question of
the arrangement around compilation of statistics at the institution,” she said.
Dr Manangazira said private institutions under the Public
Health Act (PHA) do not manage infectious and formidable diseases but in urban
areas they delegate that role to local authorities through infectious disease
hospitals.
“We then expect that when a public health crisis is an
emergency of international and national concern it is managed in those
institutions plus the public health sector. What happened with Covid-19 is that
it really became an enormous crisis and the private sector came forward to say
we want to assist, so for the first time they started managing a public health
emergency. It would naturally take them time to develop up-to-date reporting
into the national reporting system. This might account for the challenges that
we have been facing in terms of getting reports from the private institutions.
“Traditionally the private sector does not report to the
government and it is something that we are looking at now that there are
Information Communication Technologies to have reporting that is easy rather
than having to fill in a form. This is what I was bringing across to
Parliamentarians that the private sector is reluctant to bring in reports,” she
said.
However, she said ethics compel practitioners to report
infectious diseases. “We also complain that under the PHA even if one runs a
private surgery, if they see a cholera or tuberculosis case, because they were
trained as a health worker, they are mandated to report that to the secretary
for health using the fastest means possible. That is laxity that was happening
even before the Covid-19 crisis,” she said.
She said the government was grateful that the private
sector has been forthcoming leading to some laboratories having partnered with
them in testing, together with isolation facilities such as Mater Dei Hospital
and Health Point and St Annes in Harare.
She said there was need to improve on reporting of any
Covid-19 case in Zimbabwe regardless of where it is detected.
“This helps so that even our neighbours and World Health
Organisation know the accurate numbers in the country as part of the Global
Health Agenda and also for the statistics to be useful. Now we are looking at a
vaccination, we need to know what is the burden of the disease or if we need to
even consider vaccination at all, if so, then to which areas, so that
information needs to be accurate to assist us in our interventions. We also
would want to allocate human resources to private isolation centres but that
can only be possible basing on accurate patient and workload statistics. We
want to know the pressure of Covid-19 on the public and private institutions,”
she stressed. Sunday News
0 comments:
Post a Comment