Ministry of Health Permanent Secretary for Administration Christoper Simoonga has advised management at Kitwe Teaching Eye hospital to submit their plan on the expansion of the eye facility to the Ministry of health .
Dr Simoonga says the government was eager to build its own specialised eye center that would help reduce on the current number of referrals to other countries hence the need for management to make its submissions so that a budget to expand the hospital can be made available.
ZANIS reports that the Permanent Secretary said this when he visited Kitwe eye hospital in Kitwe district.
He said the government wants to see a situation where the capacity of local facilities are enhanced to handle eye treatment cases that are currently being referred abroad to reduce expenses.
“We are lucky we can always go into a memorandum of understanding with experts in India so that they can teach some of the specialised health personnel here in Zambia instead of us transferring the patients to India making us spend on air tickets among other expenses which is extremely expensive,” he said.
Dr Simoonga says the Ministry of finance was supportive as it wants to see the health care facilities equipped and ready to offer health care services to the people
He added that eye hospitals, cancer disease hospitals are a fourth level of excellence that must be built strongly in both research and service.
And Kitwe teaching eye hospital Senior Medical Superintendent
Dr.Chileshe Mboni said the hospital needs to be expanded as it now receives about 150 patients a day than the previous days when it used to receive about 60 people.
He added that there is need for more health practitioners at the clinic to help attend to the growing number of patients.
He said management will be consulting the Ministry of Health to see how best the issue of inadequate staff and expansion of the hospital can be finalised.
He observed that the hospital performs about 2000 eye surgeries in a year and also carters for children with eye problems hence the need for more health workers.
