Mpilo Central Hospital in Bulawayo, lacks proper security, resulting in some individuals walking into the institution wearing medical scrubs and impersonating medical staff.
The hospital cannot afford to hire professional security agencies and is forced to rely on its “general hands” who also double as security guards.
This situation was revealed by the hospital’s administration to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health which visited Mpilo on Monday to assess citizens’ access to public health care.
This revelation came after one of the health committee members, Sichelesile Mahlangu, asked if their ECHO department (that conducts echocardiogram scans to look at the heart and nearby blood vessels) was operational.
Mahlangu said she had heard “some people complaining that they were constantly told different dates of when to come or made to strike deals with some staff so they can be attended to sooner.”
In response, Mpilo Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Narcisius Dzvanga said the ECHO department was indeed operational.
“If there is a department that I can vouch for that is functional, it is the ECHO,” said the CMO.
However, he said it was “very unfortunate that sometimes the public prefers to deal clandestinely with our staff.”
“At one stage, we had one for paediatrics and one for adults but the space is limited. It’s not like we will have both of them running simultaneously because they are using the same machine. We allocate two days for children and the other two for adults and they have to come by appointment,” he said.
“Sometimes patients are coming from the private sector and sometimes from within so the numbers are such that they can all be dealt with in one day. But we do face that kind of situation where people are directed by non-medical people to follow them, who say ‘I can make you jump the queue and so forth.”
Dr Dzvanga said when they asked the patients for more details on such individuals as to “what they looked like,” patients would say, “they were wearing scrubs. I thought it was a nurse or nursing staff.”
“Only to find that they are not even staff members,” said the CMO.
This prompted the health committee chairperson to ask if “someone can just come into the hospital and do whatever?”
Dr Dzvanga responded that Mpilo Hospital was “short-staffed on security.”
“We don’t have a security establishment,” said Dr Dzvanga. “These are general hands cum security you may find as you go around they will be there but don’t even stop you. They don’t even ask where you’re going. We have a security department but don’t have an establishment,” he said.
Other members of the health committee were ‘shocked’ by Dr Dzanga’s response and murmured that without proper security measures, the hospital may be an easy target for disruptions of both genuine staff and patients, including threats of medical equipment theft
However, Mpilo Operations Director, Joe Charangwa explained that the hospital could not afford services from professional security companies, so it sought an internal solution.
“In terms of security as an institution, we don’t have an establishment for security because we were outsourcing those services over the years. Then it became extremely expensive to the extent that at one time we had a legacy debt to three companies,” Charangwa said.
“So we decided to create our internal security system by using the general hands that we have. We created a security department with a chief security officer and has about 79 details who manage the institution and are on payroll from the government.”
The operations director acknowledged that their security team was inadequate because of the geographical size of Mpilo Hospital, which affected service quality.
“But it is not necessarily that people just come in willy-nilly. There are system checks and balances in our setup. We do get people who roam otherwise there is a security system in place,” Charangwa said.
In 2019, former Chief Executive Officer, Dr Leonard Mabandi said one person was caught by security walking out of Mpilo carrying a machine to check Blood Pressure (BP), claiming the hospital was in the process of beefing up its security in response to a spate of thefts at the institution.
Read: https://cite.org.zw/mpilo-hospital-to-beef-up-security/
Dr Mabandi also said people frequently parked their vehicles at the hospital area, usually during football matches played at Barbourfields Stadium, others taking advantage of the lax security to park their vehicles overnight for free.
