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Mpilo Hospital’s Radiotherapy centre

Thandeka Moyo, Health Reporter
CANCER patients who have been relying on Mpilo Central Hospital’s cancer unit for radiotherapy risk falling into a relapse as they have been defaulting on treatment after the unit’s radiography machine broke down in June.

The hospital needs $63 000 to fix the machine which administers radiotherapy.

In an interview, Mr Leonard Mabandi said the hospital has since the end of June not been administering radiotherapy.

“Our major challenge is that we import these machines and expertise which makes it expensive to run the cancer unit. We entered into a service contract with a South African company and they have indicated that they can only fix the machine if we pay $63 000,” he said.

Mr Mabandi said the hospital needs to raise the required foreign curency to pay the company before its workers come to fix the machine.

“We will engage the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe so that we are included on its priority list for forex allocation. Given these circumstances we can only be able to fix this problem by mid-October,” he said.

Mr Mabandi said his fear was that the condition of the patients who have been defaulting on their cancer treatment following the breakdown of the machine, may deteriorate.

“Just like with any disease, cancer patients need to adhere to treatment. We have however managed to help other patients to access chemotherapy while they wait for their machine to be fixed,” said Mr Mabandi.

Health and Child Care Minister Dr David Parirenyatwa said it was important that funds be availed to fix the machine.

“When I got here, I was a bit unhappy as I was told that the DMX accelerator, the one used for radiotherapy is no longer working. When I asked the chief executive officer, he said one part broke down and that $63 000 is needed to fix it,” said Dr Parirenyatwa during a visit to the hospital last week.

The cancer unit which has not been operating for the past 17 years, only resumed operations last April thereby bringing relief to thousands of patients in southern parts of the country who had to travel to Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare for treatment.

@thamamoe