Junior doctors have accused Health and Child Care Minister Obadiah Moyo of giving inflated figures of doctors at work and understating the number of those incapacitated.
Speaking to NewZimbabwe.com on the sidelines of a march by doctors to Parliament on Wednesday, Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) acting vice president Dean Ndoro said:
The figure he (Moyo) gave you at the post-cabinet media briefing is not true. Of course, we were around 1 200 doctors but more than half that figure is not going to work.
… do you think hospitals would be so incapacitated if only 400 out of the 1 200 failed to turn up for work?
Provincial hospitals are hardest hit; there are barely five doctors on call at any given time.
The government recently announced that it has dismissed 448 doctors from the public service after they ignored a court order requiring them to end their strike.
The doctors, however, insisted that they were not on strike but “incapacitated” as their salaries have been eroded by runaway inflation.