United Kingdom-based medical doctor Itai Matumbike has blamed the collapse of Zimbabwe’s health delivery system on economic mismanagement.
Matumbike (IM), who works for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) shared his views on the platform In Conversation with Trevor hosted by Alpha Media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube (TN).
Below are excerpts from the interview.
TN: Greetings; welcome to In Conversation with Trevor UK series brought to you by the Nyaradzo Group. Today I’m in conversation with Dr Itai Matumbike, a medical director of Northamptonshire NHS. Dr Matumbike welcome to In Conversation with Trevor.
IM: Thank you very much for having me.
TN: We are delighted to have you here. We have been watching a number of you guys who are in the (National Health Service) NHS, it’s quite a big chunk of you.
IM: Oh yes, I think one of the biggest waves of Zimbabweans coming to the UK was in the '90s, and a lot of you, you Zimbabweans did nursing.
A lot of them went into the health profession, obviously, like myself and what we found was that they got established, they quickly acclimatised to life in the United Kingdom and you know some of them didn't really want to sort of settle within the NHS.
Some of them just wanted to use it as a stepping stone, and those who remained really excelled and quite a lot of people are in very high offices now. It's just a testament to the kind of level of Education that we have in Zimbabwe.
I think some of the difficulties and challenges that we have had in the country have led us to be people who can adapt very easily to any kind of challenging situations and excel.
TN: How did you arrive at this point to decide to leave Zimbabwe and come to the UK? What's your story like, what was your journey like?
IM: I was born and grew up in Zimbabwe. Our family moved to Harare when I was in Grade 7.
I attended one of the high schools there, Prince Edward and during high school days, I think I was around Form Four, I had a conversation with my dad about career choices.
I think I had always wanted to be something, like a diplomat, something like that. I hadn't really thought of medicine.
We started talking about options and when you are young you don't really think much about the job opportunities, where is my career going to take me and that was the first sort of serious conversation I had with my old man.
We spoke about medicine and he was in medicine himself.
TN: Interesting.
IM: He is a social scientist, worked in local government and his relationship with health goes into sort of what he did for water and sanitation.
I often think that what he did as a civil servant in terms of bringing clean water to people in the villages was more impactful from a health point of view.
I think his interest in public health kind of led to that sort of conversation and obviously, you know as a father, what he wanted was for me to be in a career that would be sustainable.
TN: So he pointed you towards medicine?
IM: Luckily, we kind of had a meeting of minds. I had always been known to be quite gifted in the sciences so that was an easy choice for me.
TN: So you were going to be a diplomat gifted in sciences?
IM: Oh yeah. I think a lot of it was kind of the exposure that we had in high school. We had a lot of kids who were children of diplomats. So we got exposed to that and I studied four languages.
TN: Which languages were these?
IM: English, Latin and French.
TN: Is this at Prince Edward?
IM: Yeah. I quite like French and so that's where the whole I ancy thing of being a diplomat came about.
TN: From Prince Edward, you then went to the University of Zimbabwe, you did work at the Ministry of Health at some point as a junior house officer, talk to me about that choice.
IM: We were deployed straight after medical school.
I think that one of the benefits of studying medicine is that you always had a guaranteed job at the end with a pretty decent salary as well during those days.
During those days, we did go on strike. What happened was that our medical school was affiliated to Parirenyatwa and Harare hospitals so from third year we would go there for ward rounds and our clinical attachments and things like.
So we sort of got to kind of grow within those hospitals and it was a very easy transition.
TN: How were you with the ministry of Health and Child Care?
IM: I think about 18 months. I think 2000 is when I graduated.
You’ll probably remember that this was around about the time of the most kind of earth shattering general elections when the MDC kind of challenged the established political party at the time and a lot of things were changing, the economy was on the decline.
Things were starting to get a bit scanty. Believe it or not, by the time I was a junior doctor, for scrubbing in the surgery we were using Lifebuoy soap.
So things were getting really difficult and it was also at the height of the Aids pandemic and Zimbabwe had probably one of the highest infection rates of the time.
So you have that compounding the economic decline, ARVs at the time were not widely available so it was quite a sorry state within the hospitals and you sort of felt a little bit powerless yet you wanted to make a difference.
You know you were trained to be able to make a difference, what drugs needed prescribing but often you watched your patients meet their death.
It was quite sad and I think for me having sort of been reluctant with medicine at the beginning by the time I had finished med school, I was really into it.
I was really into this kind of noble profession but then these conditions militate against that love.
TN: What was that which made you leave for the diaspora?
IM: Well I did what most people who were in my sort of cohort did. We were pushed out by the circumstances.
One of the biggest concerns was that it was becoming difficult to practice medicine the normal way and it was only those who had means who had access to healthcare.
So what would happen is that as junior doctors we would do an HIV test and if someone had meningitis, which was quite common at that time, we would then sort of ask them ‘do you have family in the diaspora who can get you the ARV’s that you need’ as they were not available in the public hospitals. If the answer was no, you know you had a challenge of informing the relatives that their loved one was dying of a preventable illness.
TN: You indicated that you went on strike to demand change in your conditions of service.
IM: This was in 2001. It was quite a long strike. I think it was both about the working conditions, but it was also about the pay.
That dream that my dad had sold me about guaranteed employment, a decent wage, buying a car, a house did not materialise at all. That was eroded very quickly.
We had to make the really hard choice to sort of down our tools and see if the government responded, but the government did not respond.
They were sluggish in their response to be honest.
Part of me feels guilty about the impact of that.
I love my country. I go there as often as I can.
I have had some of the best experiences of being able to run healthcare in a much more professional way. Those are the skills that I would like to take home.
TN: What I'm hearing is that it is a possibility.
IM: It is a very remote possibility. I'm used to fairness and professionalism.
In the NHS, there is proper social security, the provision of free healthcare in this country which was the dream in Zimbabwe in the 1980s.
It was a social security health system dream, but because the economy was in decline, and I'm not going to go political, it was mismanaged, which resulted in all those hospitals being very under-resourced.