Ministry to upgrade 35 health centres – Chiponda
Minister of Health, Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda, says plans are in place to upgrade about at least 35 Health Centres across the country in a bid to ease congestion which is hampering smooth operations of these health providers.
The Minister made the remarks on Tuesday during the 49th parliamentary session.
“The ministry is well aware of the problems that health providers are facing across the country and efforts are being made to remedy the situation.
“One of the solutions is upgrading health centres that are outdated,” she said.
She said the upgrading will boost the health sector as it is going to greatly reduce overcrowding consequently, prevent outbreaks that are a result of congestion.
“There has been an exponential growth of human population which is posing quite a challenge in various health centres. As such, we will upgrade to come up with more space,” Chiponda said.
The activity is set to commence during the 2020/2021 Financial Year.
In another development, the Minister said there has been an outcry from patients and hospital personnel with regards to hospital equipment.
She said purchasing, maintenance and repairing of machines such as dialysis and Magnetis Resonance Imagining (MRI) that break down take years to be repaired describing the situation as worrisome.
The situation is having a negative impact on patients that cannot afford to access those services in private hospitals as they are expensive with some hitting as far as MK 120, 000.
She said Government is working hard and will provide a “sustainable” solution.
“The repairing takes time because most experts are not locally available so there is need to contact companies that supplied the machines. We will make sure that we make a deal with the suppliers that when the machine(s) break down, they should repair for us in good time to avoid inconveniences,” she said.
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All those upgraded H/Cs should at least have Lab and X-Ray: Diagnostics is key. Doctors can’t treat what they don’t know, let’s not force them into operating like witch doctors. Lack of diagnostic services in these H/Cs is one of the main reasons why Central Hospitals operate like Big Clinics instead of focussing of tertiary care.
The absence of local engineers doesn’t justify why these machines remain dead for ages (We had JICA engineers flying from Japan to fix X-Ray equipment in Malawi. Put equipment on service contracts with accredited engineers (doesn’t matter from which country). Send local engineers to equipment manufacturers for attachments so that they specialise in fixing complicated equipment like CT, MRI, X-Ray Units etc. We’d have had a lot of local engineers by now but …. corruption and someone must be sleeping on the job. We get too excited easily when a donor gives us some piece of equipment without even asking… Read more »