BY MUNYARADZI BLESSING DOMA
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) refers to healthcare system where everyone in a country or region has access to essential healthcare services, without facing financial hardship.
Among other issues UHC seeks to ensure accessibility, affordability, equity and quality in healthcare, which is one of the aims of Government.
And with that same approach, Zimbabwe’s largest private medical aid society, health and wellness service provider, Cimas Health Group; is set to achieve this with its recently acquired state of the art mobile clinic.
Journalists had a tour of the mobile clinic at the recently held Harare Agricultural Show, as they got an appreciation of this health game changer initiative.
Cimas Health Group’s Head Clinics, Dr Travolta Mushayamano, said the initiative will take health services to the hard to reach areas of the country.
“You can be able to provide health care in the comfort of the person’s locality and really for those communities where the nearest health care facility can be kilometres away from where they stay.
“So that is the advantage of having a clinic that is on wheels and is able to do basically everything that you can find in a brick and mortar facility.
“It has the capacity to go to the communities, those hard to reach areas, so that is the plan.
“We have the Sustainable Development Goals and the main thrust there is that we should have Universal Health Coverage; so we understand that it not an assignment of the Government only. “So we come in to complement that and we should be able to reach the most peripheral parts of Zimbabwe, hardest to reach areas like Dotito, Muzarabani and go there with a clinic which is fully functional, same way you will have with a brick and mortar clinic,” said Dr Mushayamano.
He added that their mobile clinic has basically everything, including an ultra-sound scan for pregnant women.
“We have the equipment to do even minor procedures, when we visit places like mining areas where there are risks of injuries.
“The mobile clinic is registered with the Medical Aid Funders Association so what it means is that we can to be able to offer it to anyone who has a medical aid and claim from their medical aid but it also offers services on cash payment.
“So far we are trying to identify areas where you have limited capacity and the nearest health centres are quite far, like some mining areas, so we are trying to map how we are going to operate.
“We know that majority of our population lives in the rural areas so the health care data and access to health has to cover that population because that’s where most of the people are.
“So if we have more of these units, it actually helps a lot and it gives us much more quality data for reporting because really there are instances where people who are towards the borders even cross to access health care services.
“So this kind of services shall cover quite a lot of people and when we go to such hard to reach areas, we might have medical tourism from these border areas,” he said.
Dr Mushayamano added that they have plans to increase the units, but it all depends on the uptake of the service and how efficient it’s going to be.
“Initially we had actually planned to have two units, but then we decided to have one and see how it operates before expansion.”
Similar sentiments were also shared by the group’s Chief Marketing Officer, Tatenda Madzikanda, who said they are complementing the health systems that have been put in place by Government as well as other private healthcare players.
“This is a new service that we are offering and that (trip to a farm in Mhondoro) was our pilot trip.
“And we intend to come up with a schedule in terms of areas that we can service, depending with the need. But definitely we know there are members that have been asking us to come up with this innovation and I trust the uptake will actually be very high.
“So this is a first in its kind for us to be doing this and I think it’s based on research and input that we have gotten from our members.
“The pilot study was very successful; we did two days and based from the feedback from the patients; they actually wanted us to come back again the other day.
“So our outreach trips are going to be structured in such a way that we spend a week at a certain place so members in that area would then know that the Cimas mobile clinic is going to be coming first week of every month or last week of every month.
“So this is what we are in the process of coming up with and we trust very soon we will be able to do that.”
