RETIRED Kwekwe nurse, Theresa Gore, has proved that to her nursing was more of a calling than a job when she converted her husband’s former bar into a thriving private clinic now running under Population Services Zimbabwe (PSZ)’s Blue Star franchise.
BY VENERANDA LANGA
Gore told members of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health and Child Care during a tour of her clinic in Mbizo last Thursday that she invested all her pension savings to kickstart the project when she left formal employment in 2011.
Her surgery has now become one of the success stories of PSZ Blue Star-supported family planning and reproductive health clinics. Gore is also a midwife.
“I used to work at Kwekwe Municipality as a nurse, and after retiring in 2011, I decided to operate a private clinic from an under-utilised section of my husband’s bar and I converted the area into a surgery,” Gore said.
“I partitioned the place into different rooms using money that I got as pension, and I started with two nurses, nurse aides and a receptionist,” she said.
Gore said she also used part of her pension funds to procure equipment to use for services offered at her surgery.
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“Each month, I treat approximately 1 000 patients. PSZ assists the clinic by training staff, availing family planning commodities for free and ensuring we provide quality services to clients,” she said.
Apart from general health care, the clinic provides family planning services such as insertion and removal of jadelle, the loop, depo provera, contraceptive pills, other methods as well as counselling and pre-natal and post-natal maternity services.
PSZ social franchise co-ordinator for the Southern Region, Partson Ndlovu, said: “This is one of the best clinics because the women who access family planning services are given one-on-one counselling as compared to hospitals where there is a high volume of patients and individual counselling is impossible.”
PSZ director for grants and external relations Pester Siraha said it costs them $1 100 to train a single person to run Blue Star family planning programmes.
Parliamentary committee chairperson Ruth Labode said the services offered by the clinic were imperative for the country as they reduced congestion at government hospitals.
“It gives people a choice of where they want to access health services. Most of the time government and council clinics do not have drugs, but PSZ clinics are always equipped,” Labode said.
