Aid to the Church in Need: Zimbabwe: ACN helps Zimbabwe hospital threatened with closure

Zimbabwe: ACN helps Zimbabwe hospital threatened with closure

Posted by Press release on 20/1/2009, 7:55 am
Board Administrator

ACN News, Tuesday, 20th January 2009 - ZIMBABWE

ACN helps Zimbabwe hospital

Emergency package agreed amid threats of closure

By John Newton and John Pontifex

CATHOLIC charity Aid to the Church in Need has given urgent aid to one of the last remaining hospitals in Zimbabwe’s second city still able to provide quality care.
The payment of more than $50,000 for the Mater Dei Hospital in Bulawayo, in south-west Zimbabwe, came in response to increasing fears that a funding crisis could force the 170-bed acute hospital to shut.
Closure of the private hospital, opened by British-based Franciscan missionaries, would spell disaster for local people amid a crisis in government hospitals, compounded by news this week that state-sponsored doctors would continue to strike over pay.
Lodging the application for ACN aid, Mgr Martin Schupp, Apostolic administrator of Bulawayo, wrote: “Government hospitals are barely functioning in the city and Mater Dei Hospital is the only place where any standard of medical are can be obtained.”
With inflation officially at 230 million percent, Mater Dei’s administrators have faced increasingly financial headaches, especially with many doctors and nurses across the country leaving for better paid jobs abroad.
The ACN aid will help with doctors’ salaries and essential medicine so the hospital can continue its broad range of services including paediatrics, maternity, obstetrics and accident and emergency.
Applying for ACN funds, hospital administrators wrote: “Mater Dei struggles to buy drugs and some consumables as they need to be paid for in foreign currency and we only generate Zimbabwean dollars.”
A hospital spokesman said: “We need to ensure that we can keep staff and that, when the situation in the country reverses, we still have professionals in our society to help rebuild.”
With ACN’s help – and more aid expected from other organisations – the hospital will no longer have to force patients to pay up front and will be able to continue offering concessions.
“We feel that as a Catholic institution we should not be turning sick people away just because of money,” the hospital spokesman said.
Pressure on private hospitals has increased sharply, especially after news on Monday (12th January) that doctors had rejected a government offer of US$150-850 per month, demanding between US$2,600 and $4,000.
The hospital was opened in 1952 by the Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM) and was handed over to a Board of Trustees in 1998 with several Sisters as members.

Editor’s Notes:

Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action.

Founded in 1947 by Fr Werenfried van Straaten, whom Pope John Paul II named “An Outstanding Apostle of Charity”, the organisation is now at work in about 145 countries throughout the world.

The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, 45 million Aid to the Church in Need Child’s Bibles have been distributed worldwide.

For more information, please contact the Sydney office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148. Web: www.aidtochurch.org

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Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148 ABN: 62 418 911 594
Ph/Fax (02) 9679-1929 e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org web: www.aidtochurch.org