Maputo, 7 May (AIM) – The chairperson of the Association of United Health Professionals of Mozambique (APSUSM), Anselmo Muchave, on Monday claimed that hundreds of patients have died a a direct result of the strike called by APSUSM, but Health Minister Armindo Tiago dismissed the claim as completely false.
The APSUSM strike began on 29 April. At a Maputo press conference, Muchave claimed that, in the ensuing week, 327 patients had died, mostly of hunger. He did not seem dismayed at this appalling figure and threatened that, if the government does not meet all the APSUSM demands, its members will switch off all the morgues in the country’s hospitals, thus ensuring that the bodies they contain will rot.
The idea that a strike which has so far lasted just a week could result in hundreds of extra deaths in the hospitals is clearly absurd – particularly as health workers in several of the country’s largest hospitals have not joined the strike.
Muchave claimed that most of the deaths had occurred in Beira Central Hospital, the largest health unit in the central provinces. But when reporters from the independent television station STV visited this hospital last week, they found that not a single health worker had joined the strike, and all the hospital’s services were working normally.
It was the same at the Nampula Central Hospital, the largest hospital in northern Mozambique. Here STV could find no sign of a strike.
The strike was affecting services in the southern province of Inhambane, and in some Maputo health units. But STV found that at one of the main Maputo hospitals, the Jose Macamo General Hopital, all its services were operating.
Muchave also claimed, without any evidence, that strikers are being threatened with transfer to remote areas, and with disciplinary proceedings.
“We are suffering moral harassment by clinical directors in the health units, provincial directors, administrators and heads of human resource departments, who are coercing us to go to work, by threatening to mark us absent”, claimed Muchave.
Senior Health Ministry officials in Maputo told reporters last week that they would indeed mark strikers as absent. It is absolutely normal, in any country, that people not at work are marked as absent. The normal penalty is to lose that day’s wages.
Muchave claimed that 95 per cent of health staff are on strike – a claim that is obviously absurd, given that most of the health service is
continuing to operate.
He repeated familiar claims, denied last year by the Health Ministry, of severe shortages of medicines and surgical equipment, and of food for patients.
Health Minister Armindo Tiago dismissed most of these claims. Cited by STV, he said “No health unit in the country is on strike”, and all of APSUSM’s claims about deaths and the current situation in the hospitals “are false”.
He said the government has already granted many of the demands made by the health workers, and was working with the General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) on the question of overtime pay and shift allowances.
“We are confirming the names with the IGF in order to pay for the overtime worked”, he said. “We are also regularizing payment of the shift allowance, but since this concerns many workers, mistakes may occur”.
(AIM)
Pf/ (548)
