Officials from the Ministry of Health and Child Care revealed that district hospitals and other smaller health institutions are using unqualified people to handle accounting and other administrative tasks.
Speaking before a Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee on Monday morning, an official from the Ministry said:
In our districts and in our provinces we really do not have qualified personnel who are doing this work because remember the Ministry of Health has decentralised.
So all these issues are coming down from the districts up to the provinces and then we consolidate the data at HQ.
The official’s remarks were corroborated by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Dr Agnes Mahomva who said:
We can’t keep crying that we don’t have this or that the establishment has not put enough personnel. Work must still continue. We are using these unqualified persons [but] we can train them.
So we have got manuals, and we have trained most of them. We are going to complete the rest before the end of the year.