Gwanda Municipality urged to improve services

There is need for Gwanda Municipality to improve its delivery of essential services in order to improve the livelihoods of women, persons with disabilities and youths. This emerged during the 2021 Gwanda budget consultation meeting which sought to gather the public’s views on the proposed budget for the following year.
The plea was triggered by the challenge women face at a local clinic as they endure long hours in queues to access health care services as a result of understaffing.
Speaking at the consultation meeting, women said Phakama clinic had five nurses who worked at the clinic, adding that there is need to recruit more staff members as the clinic services the whole town.
Nomusa Vela said nurses working at that clinic were not able to provide services for everyone who came there as evidenced by the many hours spent in queues.
“Clinic staff is overwhelmed. As women we think that there is need to recruit more nurses so that many people can get the help they need. In as much as the city council is recruiting more security personnel, we think that our health is more important hence the need to recruit more nurses,” she said.
Vela added that “some HIV patients are defaulting because they giving up going to the clinic because they know that they will not get the services they require” and that there should be two more clinics constructed at Garikai and Spiskop suburbs.
Vanessa Masawi said some residents were finding it hard to access ambulance services as it almost did not have fuel to transport to ferry patients to the clinic all the times.
“Council owned ambulances are not reliable at all. Whenever one requires their services, they are always disappointed because they will not be having fuel. We ask that in the following year you prioritize this because many lives have been lost because of lac of fuel,” said Masawi.
Other women bemoaned refuse collection services, saying that lack of such services posed a health hazard to the and that Gwanda council needed to purchase more compractors instead of continuously repairing old vehicles which came at a high cost.
Gwanda Town Clerk, Priscilla Nkala said the city council was working on a number of projects to improve service delivery. She council was planning on constructing a clinic at Spiskop North during the course of the year, however the emergence of COVID 19 has had a negative impact on their plans as other finances were channeled towards containing the virus.
Nkala said: “We are also planning on recruiting a medical officer to oversee operations at Phakama clinic as part of our plans to expand the clinic operations.”
Participants also called for the resuscitation of council buildings in order improve revenue generating schemes and provision of more medication in the local clinics.