The Malawian government prohibits doctors in the public health system from working in private healthcare.
By Gonzalo Viton and Boniface Gbamafrom Lilongwe (Malawi)
The Government of Malawi has banned public healthcare workers from owning or working in private healthcare facilities. With this measure, the Mutharika Executive seeks to restore the trust of citizens and ensure that public resources do not favor private interests.
This initiative came shortly after the Platform for Investigative Journalism (PIJ) published an article on its website about corrupt practices in several of Malawi’s large public hospitals and clinics. The investigation, which has had a great impact on the country’s main media, has forced the Government, with a short time in power, to make a move.
The PIJ, created in 2019, has already published more than 200 investigations. Its objective is to strengthen truth and democracy through investigative journalism, as demonstrated by this work carried out by ten journalists and which gave shape to the article “Pay or die: the shadow corruption networks that control Malawi’s public hospitals.”
The team of reporters denounced the existence of criminal networks present in public health centers, whose objective was to charge for free treatments. These practices put the lowest-income people, above all, at risk, since in many cases they could not afford the money required, which caused long waits, worsening of their health and even, on some occasions, death.
Although Malawi’s public hospitals offer universal free healthcare, PIJ uncovered an invisible fee system that operated “like an underground economy that rewards those who can pay and mercilessly abandons those who cannot.” The investigation, carried out over several months in seven public centres, revealed a “coordinated ecosystem of corruption” that turned “waiting rooms into a market where the price of survival ranged between 4,000 and 260,000 kuachas (between €2 and €130)”.
Among the practices reported, there are cases of how after paying an amount of money, the name of a person who had been waiting for more than 24 hours appeared on the doctor’s list. The report also denounced the payment that a family had to make for a patient to access the medical tests necessary to perform a surgical intervention, or how another family had to make a large outlay to access an ambulance to take their son to the hospital. Bouba Jalloh, in an article for the DW portal, collects the opinion of several specialists, who fear that the Executive’s decision will force health personnel to leave the public sector, “which would aggravate the personnel crisis that the country’s hospitals are already suffering.”
This case highlights the importance of journalistic investigative work to fight against the inequalities and injustices present in the daily lives of countries like Malawi, as well as the need to protect the work of health professionals.
In the image above, several patients request a consultation at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe. Photography: Lucas Oleniuk / Getty
