EDITORIAL: Find ways and means to boost healthcare
Reports that Mount Meru Hospital in Arusha is overwhelmed by patients should be cause for concern. Built in the 1930s to serve a handful of government workers and a few colonial settlers and their families – as well as the occasional indigene straying into town from pasture-and-croft-lands – Mount Meru today strains every nerve to serve up to 300 outpatients daily.
This is to say nothing of any number of admission/inpatient spillovers from its modest 371-bed capacity that is clearly incongruent with a regional public hospital in the vibrant northern tourism circuit hub. Yet, that is what Mount Meru Hospital is facing today – a pitiable situation replicated in scores of village, district, regional and referral hospitals across the nation.
Tanzania’s healthcare system is typically hierarchical, rising from the village dispensary (with at least one medical doctor or registered assistant medical officer serving 10,000 inhabitants), and a health centre (50,000 inhabitants), to district hospital (100,000-200,000) and regional/referral hospitals (a million-plus population).
Then there are consultant hospitals with special departments, medical schools, etc. The list includes Muhimbili (Dar es Salaam), KCMC (Moshi) and Bugando (Mwanza). But, almost without an exception, all the healthcare establishments – both government and private – are overwhelmed by rapidly rising patient numbers, fuelled by increasing availability of health insurance.
The establishments also labour under acute shortages or lack of qualified personnel, blood and body part donors and state-of-the-art medical facilities, including operating theatres, laboratories, beds/beddings, diagnostic equipment/devices, ambulances and medicinal products.
These shortcomings cannot be remedied by Tanzanians and/or their government alone – not by a long shot. That is why we earnestly urge our development partners, both bilateral and multilateral, to step in the breach and do the needful to elevate our facilities and personnel to the next level in terms of quality healthcare/patients ratio
