AUTHORITIES at Parirenyatwa Hospital announced on Tuesday that they have tightened their security measures.
This follows the arrest of more than 30 people who had been masquerading as the institution’s employees.
Speaking to journalists, Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals spokesperson, Linos Dhire, said unscrupulous people took advantage of the vastness of their complex to carry out criminal activities.
“As a hospital, we have close to 4 000 employees, we could be the largest institution in this country in terms of employees working in one place,” he said.
“We have got about 900 patients who are admitted here every day so if you take those people and check how many visitors come here, you will find that there are multitudes of people who come here for different reasons.
“So, for us to then say no crime happens, I think that will be an over expectation from our side.
“We are bound to have one or two culprits who come into the system, but we have beefed up our security and surveillance at the hospital to ensure that thieves are arrested.
“We are somehow proud that the three bogus doctors who were arrested were caught at the right time and none of them handled any patients, but they were tracked whilst trying to do their shenanigans.”
There has been serious concern that the security systems at Parirenyatwa are easy to manipulate and this has seen various crimes being committed at the vast medical facility.
Somehow, it had become the hospital of choice for some fake doctors with many being nabbed this year alone.
Clearly, this has a significant effect, in terms of trust, because at Parirenyatwa, we are talking about serious issues related to life and death.
A hospital of such a magnitude needs to retain the trust of its patients, and even those who are not ill but will be sick one day, that they will be in safe hands when they go there.
They need to feel that their ailments will be taken care of by specialists who will be able to heal them and not by bogus doctors whose only knowledge of medicine starts and ends with pain killers.
Or fake doctors who can’t even read an X-Ray and are found reading it upside down, as was the case with one of the bogus doctors who was caught at Parirenyatwa.
We expected the authorities who are leading Parirenyatwa to come out and provide us with assurance that the security breaches will be a thing of the past.
They have done just that with Dhire telling the journalists that surveillance teams will continue to flush out criminals bent on abusing public trust in the institution.
This is refreshing but we hope that it won’t just be words and no action going forward.
Parirenyatwa Hospital is a national institution and we have to ensure that everything is done to protect the patients and the good name of this hospital.