By Linda Mujuru
When Paidamoyo Magawa was told she had malfunctioning kidneys early this year, she began treatment immediately.
For more than two weeks, Magawa took the prescribed medication, but her condition only worsened.
“I tasted death,” she recalled. The diagnosis, she later learnt, was wrong after a different doctor ordered new blood tests, which were analysed at another laboratory.
When the retests were done, they showed that she did not have a kidney problem, but rather a minor urinary infection. By then, she had already been admitted to a public hospital.
Her experience is not unique. Across Zimbabwe, patients and doctors are raising alarm over inconsistent test results from medical laboratories, a problem linked to the rapid growth of diagnostic testing facilities that, doctors say, do not always meet professional standards.
In early 2020, Zimbabwe’s testing capacity was limited to a few public laboratories. But by December that year, the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC) had licensed 29 private laboratories for COVID-19 testing, bringing the total number of approved centres (public, NGO, and private) to 58.
The centres included those owned by the government, non-governmental organisations and the private sector.
By mid-2021, hundreds of smaller clinics were offering rapid tests, and daily testing volumes reached new highs.
This rapid expansion filled a critical need, but also exposed weaknesses.
Some new labs lacked trained staff or validated equipment to perform reliable tests. Others used rapid antigen kits with limited sensitivity, leading to false negatives and false assurances. The ministry itself warned that any result from an unauthorised laboratory would be treated as invalid under the Health Professions Act.
After COVID-19, many of these labs continued operating, offering a range of other medical tests.
Even now, patients often take multiple tests at different laboratories, sometimes paying in scarce US dollars to confirm a diagnosis, several doctors confirmed during this investigation. Many clinicians said they now hesitate to trust results from lesser-known or smaller labs.
667 health institutions registered in 2025
Alois Muzvaba, a medical doctor and member of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA), said he receives between two and three questionable test results from his patients each day.
“In those instances, we say 90% of the diagnosis comes from what the patient is telling you,” Muzvaba said.
“But such test results confuse the doctor and delay treatment because most of the time we have to request a retest at a different laboratory.”
According to the Zimbabwe National Health Laboratory Policy, the country has more than 170 formally registered diagnostic centres operating at various referral levels, from national reference laboratories to district hospitals.
Clotilda Chimbwanda, secretary General of the Health Professions Authority (HPA), said the authority does not track the number of medical laboratories specifically, but monitors health institutions in general.
“To date, we have a database of more than 3 500 institutions in Zimbabwe,” Chimbwanda said.
“For the year 2025, we have successfully registered 667 new health institutions.
“This follows approximately 420 new institutions that were opened and registered during the previous year.”
She said each year there has been a steady increase in the number of facilities.
Doctors said the consequences of this influx and weak regulations were visible in their daily work.
Dr Moyo, a general practitioner who operates a private clinic in Harare and requested to be identified only by his last name for fear of losing clients, said he frequently encounterd cases where clinical data and patient symptoms do not align with laboratory results.
“In such cases, I end up requesting a retest and sending the blood to a different lab,” Moyo said.
“It increases costs for the patient, but to treat them properly, I need reliable test results, and most of the time the new results come back different from the first ones.”
He noted that it was often the smaller laboratories that produce unreliable results, though larger ones occasionally face problems too.
“I think all labs at times have issues. But for the mainstream laboratories, what I’ve noticed is that such misleading results don’t go on for long,” Moyo said.
“It could be a machinery issue, perhaps a batch of tests done within a certain timeframe when maintenance was due. For other laboratories, it may reflect poor standards of practice across the whole facility.
“What I have seen recurring are more and more discrepancies in results for the same tests and the same patients.”
Esther Dongo, a laboratory technician, described frequent requests to rerun tests from patients who were confused or doubtful after receiving conflicting results.
Earlier this year, while working at Chitungwiza Hospital, she witnessed an incident where a private laboratory based in Chitungwiza falsified a patient’s medical test results.
Dongo said this reliance on external labs by public hospitals stems from the lack of adequate testing facilities within hospitals, a gap that ultimately affects patients.
Poorly staffed laboratories
Zimbabwe’s public health system continues to face major gaps in laboratory diagnostic capacity, particularly at the primary care level.
According to data published in Frontiers in Public Health (2022), about 92% of the country’s 1,696 primary-level hospitals, rural health centres, and clinics lacked full laboratory facilities, offering only limited rapid tests for diseases such as HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.
The Fleming Fund’s situational analysis (2025) noted that only about 25% of public laboratories have adequate staff, equipment, and reagents to carry out culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing. These constraints limit diagnostic accuracy and timeliness in public hospitals, often forcing patients to seek services from private laboratories, which can be significantly more expensive.
Investigations by CITE revealed disparities in the cost of laboratory tests, a pattern that Moyo said it reflected poor regulation of pricing and quality.
For example, a U&E test, one of the tests Magawa underwent, costs US$25 at Lancet, US$10 at Interpath, US$20 at Progressive Diagnostic Laboratory, and US$15 at Biogene Laboratory.
Moyo said there was need for standardisation of both prices and service quality.
“What happens is the public will try to seek cheaper alternatives. So, that huge disparity is also a reflection of the quality of care,” he said.
Muzvaba added that some laboratories charged as little as US$5 for a full blood count test, even though the reagents and chemicals required cost about US$7.
“These reagents should be changed daily, and machines calibrated daily, and such prices reflect some kind of shortcut,” he said.
The regulatory framework for laboratory services is clear on paper. The registration process begins with the relevant professional body, in this case, the Medical Laboratory and Clinical Scientists Council of Zimbabwe (MLCSCZ).
Practitioners must be registered and hold a valid practising certificate, as required by the Health Professions Act (Chapter 27:19), which prohibits unregistered persons from giving medical advice or performing diagnostics.
Once the council accepts an application, it forwards it to the Health Professions Authority of Zimbabwe (HPA) for inspection against the minimum standards outlined in the HPA’s inspection manual, Chimbwanda said.
In 2025, the government launched the National Health Laboratory Strategic Plan (2025–2030), aimed at strengthening accreditation, digital tracking, and external quality assessment. But experts caution that without increased funding, staffing, and enforcement capacity, the plan may fall short.
The huge cost of misdiagnosis
Muzvaba said a single misdiagnosis can mean the difference between timely care and tragedy. It can also erode trust in the health system, driving patients toward informal remedies or delaying treatment.
“As long as we have public hospitals not running simple tests such as a full blood count, there will always be questionable labs coming up because public hospitals serve the bulk of patients,” he said.
“If hospitals can perform these basic tests, it will reduce overreliance on private labs.
“Once patients receive standard and good-quality healthcare, everything else will fall into place.”
For Magawa and many others, those systemic failures translate into personal pain.
“The experience has made me feel sceptical about the quality of care and reliability of testing facilities,” she said. “I am almost always compelled to seek a second opinion for any tests I get done because I have no faith in the credibility of the results.”
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