What is going on at Gweru Provincial Hospital?

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

This morning, I was informed of the passing of a distant relative.

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It was a message that, in any other context, would have brought a sharp, singular sting of grief.

But when I read the name of the institution where she breathed her last, something deeper and more visceral was triggered within me.

It was not just sorrow; it was a cold, familiar dread.

Over the past few months, a haunting pattern has emerged.

Several people I know have entered the gates of this provincial referral center seeking life and departed in a shroud.

Among them was the person who anchored my world—my dear mother, who passed away there on the 4th of October 2025.

As I sat with the news of this latest loss, I found myself compelled to ask a question that many in the Midlands are whispering in grief-stricken corridors: What is truly going wrong at Gweru Provincial Hospital?

​There is a dangerous, ready-made excuse often used to shield referral hospitals from scrutiny.

The narrative suggests that because these are “end-of-the-line” institutions, the mortality rates are naturally higher because patients arrive “far gone,” having exhausted the resources of lower-level clinics.

I find this explanation not only insufficient but patently dishonest.

Many patients are referred to Gweru Provincial Hospital not because they are at death’s door, but because our healthcare system has become so hollowed out at the primary level that basic specialist attention—the kind that should be available in any functional district hospital—is now concentrated only at the provincial level.

My mother was a testament to this systemic failure.

She was not referred to Gweru because she was terminal; she was referred because she had a partial abdominal obstruction that required a specialist surgeon.

That surgeon happened to be in Gweru.

Had that specialist been stationed in Kwekwe, she might be alive today.

There was nothing immediately life-threatening about her condition upon admission.

Even the multiple doctors who saw her, including the specialist surgeon on that Friday afternoon, raised no alarms.

She was in pain, yes, but she was stable.

Her surgery was not even scheduled as an emergency.

Yet, less than twenty-four hours after entering that ward, she was dead.

The official explanation for my mother’s death was respiratory complications due to pleural effusion leading to multiple organ failure.

The doctor who conducted the morning rounds—the same man who would later sign her death confirmation—claimed that when he saw her briefly that morning, she “appeared alright.”

Minutes later, as he walked toward the male ward, he received the call that she was gone.

This “appearing alright” masks a catastrophic failure in basic clinical observation.

If my mother died of respiratory failure, the most fundamental question remains: Why was the customary blood oxygen saturation test likely never performed?

A simple pulse oximeter, a device no larger than a staple remover and costing a fraction of a specialist’s consultation fee, could have signaled the danger.

In her previous stays at Kwekwe General Hospital and Topomasi Clinic, she was consistently placed on oxygen.

Her medical records were clear: she had been diagnosed with pleural effusion—water on the lungs—just three weeks prior and had undergone a week-long chest drain.

These records, along with a chest X-ray taken just two hours before she arrived in Gweru, were available to the staff.

They knew her lungs were compromised.

Yet, at a supposedly superior referral hospital, this critical history was ignored.

It is most likely no oxygen was administered.

The very basics of life-saving care were likely treated as optional extras.

The dysfunction at Gweru Provincial Hospital extends beyond clinical oversight into the realm of administrative negligence.

When my mother was admitted around 4:00 PM on Friday, October 3rd, she arrived with an explicit instruction from the specialist surgeon who had seen her: she needed an abdominal X-ray.

However, the radiographer was nowhere to be found.

The staff made repeated attempts to locate her, but the calls went unanswered, and the search yielded nothing.

Eventually, the ward staff simply gave up, stating the X-ray would have to wait until the following morning.

My mother did not have until the following morning.

Would that X-ray have shown the respiratory distress that was quietly claiming her?

Perhaps.

But the fact that a provincial referral hospital can effectively shut down a critical diagnostic department because one individual is unreachable is an indictment of the hospital’s management.

It suggests a culture where the urgency of a patient’s life is secondary to the convenience of the staff.

The accounts from relatives who visited her in the early hours of that Saturday morning are perhaps the most harrowing.

Having traveled through the night from Harare, they arrived outside of official visiting hours and pleaded to see her.

They found her not “alright,” but crying in great, agonizing pain.

The medical staff on duty told them she had been in that state throughout the entire night.

Rather than administering the necessary relief themselves, the staff asked the relatives to go out and purchase painkillers.

This is a recurring theme of the Zimbabwean healthcare experience—the “prescription-only” treatment where the hospital provides the bed and the grieving family provides the medicine.

I had been given a prescription for IV paracetamol by a nurse the previous evening and was told to bring it during the 1:00 PM visiting hour the next day.

As I drove from my home in Redcliff, medicine in hand, I was already too late.

The system had waited for a visiting hour that my mother would never see.

For me, this is not just a critique of a failing institution; it is a mourning for a life that was the center of my universe.

As an only child who lost my father twenty-five years ago, my mother was my only immediate family.

We had a bond forged in the quiet resilience of a small family, a relationship defined by the kind of unconditional love that leaves a void no investigation can fill.

To lose her to a condition that was not inherently fatal, in a place that was supposed to be her best hope for recovery, is a burden of “what ifs” that I will carry forever.

I cannot accept that her death was an act of God when it looks so much like an act of negligence.

There is an urgent, screaming need for a thorough investigation into the operations of Gweru Provincial Hospital.

We cannot continue to hide behind the excuse of “lack of resources.”

While it is true that our national health system is underfunded, a lack of money does not explain why a radiographer vanishes during a shift.

It does not explain why a patient with a known lung condition is not monitored with a basic pulse oximeter that even lower-level clinics possess.

It does not explain why a doctor finds a patient “alright” minutes before they suffer multiple organ failure.

These are failures of protocol, failures of discipline, and failures of basic human empathy.

The authorities must look into the mortality rates at this institution and ask why so many families are walking out of those gates with death certificates instead of discharge papers.

We need accountability for the missing staff and the ignored medical histories.

Gweru Provincial Hospital should be a place of healing, a beacon of hope for the Midlands province.

Instead, for many of us, it has become a place where the light of our lives is extinguished by a thousand small, avoidable oversights.

My mother deserved better.

The relative I lost today deserved better.

Every Zimbabwean who is referred to that hospital deserves the assurance that they are entering a place of care, not a place of no return.

The silence from the hospital administration must end, and the investigation must begin, before more families are left to drive home with unused medicine and broken hearts.

• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to WhatsApp or Call: +263715667700 | +263782283975, or email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com, or visit website: https://mbofanatendairuben.news.blog/