By NATION REPORTER
PRIVATE laboratories at Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital (UTH) have continued operating despite Health Minister Sylvia Masebo giving a directive that they should close down.
UTH and Levy Mwanawasa Teaching Hospital have had critical shortages of reagents used to conduct full blood count tests while private laboratories housed within the hospital premises had continued to operate and thriving with all the needed reagents.
Recently, Ms Masebo indicated that all the private laboratories at UTH needed to close down in the shortest possible time as government was in the process of restocking the labs with reagents.
But a worker at UTH said the private laboratory had continued to operate while the government laboratory still had no reagents to operate at full capacity.
The worker who wanted to remain anonymous said that no action has been taken after the minister’s directive and claimed it was just a political gimmick.
He said the matter was worse as the other problem was that even the chemistry machine had stopped working.
“The situation is very bad at the moment and we do not know what is going because the situation has not improved in any way,” he said.
The source said the situation was really bad as people were paying huge amounts of money just to have their tests and those that failed suffered the consequences.
