The Mozambican President, Daniel Chapo, defended the dialog with the health professionals who have been on strike since Thursday in Mozambique, considering that the government is making efforts to find solutions.
“What we are currently doing is sitting down with this group to understand why they are insisting [on the strike],” said Daniel Chapo, during a meeting on Thursday with civil servants in Inhambane, a province in southern Mozambique.
At issue is the strike by Mozambican health workers that began on Thursday, with a deadline of 30 days and which could be extended if “concrete agreements” are not reached with the government.
“The strike (…) will last 30 days, which can be extended. [Shifts on] weekends, evenings and public holidays will no longer be worked in Mozambican, until the government resolves the situation of health professionals,” Anselmo Muchave, president of the Association of United and Solidarity Health Professionals of Mozambican (APSUSM), told Lusa on Thursday.
For three years, APSUSM has been demanding that the government provide hospitals with medicines to meet their needs, with the drugs in some cases being purchased by the patients themselves, as well as the purchase of hospital beds.
Other demands include resolving the “lack of food”, equipping ambulances with emergency supplies and non-disposable personal protective equipment, the absence of which is “forcing employees to buy it out of their own pockets”, payment of overtime, as well as a better framework within the Single Wage Table (TSU).
For Chapo, dialogue is essential and the executive is making efforts to pay salaries at a time when the country, which went to general elections in October, continues to operate with the previous year’s budget.
“It’s not all civil servants, it’s a group (…) We want to understand from this group why they are insisting, at a time when civil servants needed the 13th salary and it was paid. At a time when there were overtime debts in both education and health and they are being paid gradually too,” said the Mozambican head of state.
The strike will consist of changing the working hours of health professionals, who will only work from 07:00 to 15:30 local time, “according to the schedule established by law”, with a 30-minute break.
The strike had previously been postponed as part of negotiations with the government, but the professionals had already warned of their members’ “impatience”.
On March 21, the Mozambican Minister of Health, Ussene Isse, warned that a possible strike in the sector would be “a disaster” and asked the professionals for dialogue.
“A health strike is a disaster, a real disaster. Just imagine not attending to a patient in the resuscitation room for 10 to 15 minutes, a critical patient, what will happen? Death. It’s happened here several times, relatives of our colleagues have lost their lives. Is this a tragedy or not?” Ussene Isse questioned, guaranteeing that the government has been ‘guided by dialog’ with the professionals in the field with the aim of resolving their concerns.
Over the last two years, the Mozambican National Health System has faced several moments of pressure, caused by staff strikes, called first by the Mozambican Medical Association (AMM) and then by APSUSM, which covers around 65,000 health professionals from different departments and which demand, above all, improvements in working conditions.
The country has a total of 1,778 health units, 107 of which are health posts, three are specialized hospitals, four central hospitals, seven are general, seven provincial, 22 rural and 47 district, according to the most recent data from the Ministry of Health.
Lusa
