SHANNISE DZOBO
MASVINGO – Masvingo Provincial Hospital Medical Superintendent, Dr Noel Zulu has refuted rumours doing rounds that the only provincial referral medical facility was facing serious raw sewage pipe bursts resulting in patients being prematurely discharged to avoid infection.
Dr Zulu told The Midweek Watch that the hospital is old and worn out, but the government has injected some funds to save the situation and most of the areas are undergoing repair hence there is a lot of movement being witnessed at the hospital and some people may misconstrue that as burst pipes.
“As you know that the provincial hospital is very old and needs to be renovated and since the government injected some funds to renovate the hospital, we have started with changing the old water system that was hindering the proper circulation of water in the hospital wards and we are doing it in phases,” said Dr Zulu.
He added, “As we are renovating in sections, we are forced to move some patients somewhere and as of now, all the critical patients are being moved to the Military ward waiting for the renovations to be done and for those that are stable we are referring them back to district hospitals so that they wait for their procedures from where they got referred from”.
He went on to say that at the moment they are renovating the female surgical wards and they will move to the male ward, followed by the kids’ section and lastly the school of nursing.
Apparently, the halls of residence of the provincial nursing school were closed last year owing to challenges related to the obsolete water and sewer reticulation system which has forced students to seek residence outside the hospital.
The Superintendent went on to appeal to the people of Masvingo to help rebuild the provincial hospital for it serves as a referral hospital for the whole province.
“I was hoping that despite the funds that have been injected by the government to renovate the hospital, business people and other well wishers could chip in, in whatever way they can so that we uplift the face of the biggest referral hospital in Masvingo Province,” he said.
He acknowledged that everything was going on according to plan.
“As for student nurses, we hope they will be back at the hostels in batches by the year end,” he added.
