Mzuzu mayor cheers newborns, appalled by poor state of health centre
It was meant to be a New Year treat, but Mzuzu Mayor William Mkandawire literally found himself in the thick of things on New Year’s day when he went to Mzuzu Health Centre to donate various items to newborns.
Mzuzu residents and experts have been calling for the expansion of the health centre opposite Mzuzu Main Market for years, but the mayor only came face-to-face with the hard realities of congestion during the charity spree on his 29th birthday yesterday.
Instead of meeting smiling faces, the youthful mayor was faced with 34 women canned in 12 beds where mothers-in-waiting, newborns and babies with infectious diseases live in the same ward due to shortage of space.
About 22 of the occupants of the overcrowded room sleep on unclothed mattresses on a floor littered with luggage.
Around 10am when he ventured into the ward where two babies were born just an hour in the New Year, the backdrop of the only public health centre in Mzuzu—a city of about 250 000 people—was marked with queues of outpatients and tens of guardians sleeping on reed mats.
The latter often spend the night in the open due to lack of a guardian shelter.
“Being my birthday and New Year, I thought it wise to come here to cheer our mothers and babies as well as to appreciate the problems affecting delivery of quality health services at the health centre,” said the mayor having witnessed how the lone facility has refused to grow amid rapid population growth.
But what he saw was worse than the situation he had had on January 1 1985 when he was born at Mlambe Catholic Hospital in Blantyre.
Almost three decades on, he stated: “It is unacceptable for babies and people who come to seek health services to be sleeping on the floor. The city council will look into ways to lessen the problem.”
Up to 20 babies are born at the health centre, which sees nearly 350 people daily, according to chief clinical officer Wesley Sichali.
He said: “The facility is always overwhelmed day and night. Health procedures require us to have separate rooms for women waiting for delivery, newly born babies and newborns with special conditions, but we are compelled to put them in the same ward because the health centre has no room for expansion. The council tells us there is no more space for the desired expansion.”
As a stop-gap, Mzimba North District Health Office is working hand-in-hand with the council to reopen Zolozolo Clinic and establish a new one in Musongwe Township.
