ZIMBABWEAN doctors operate under an outdated and prohibitive legal framework that makes it a criminal offence to advertise medical services.
While this law may once have been intended to protect the public from unethical conduct, in today’s technologically-driven world, it has become a serious barrier to healthcare access, innovation and national development.
As the law currently stands, the general rule is simple and blunt: medical practitioners are not allowed to advertise their professional services to the public.
Any form of promotion intended to attract patients is prohibited, unless it falls within a few narrow and highly restrictive exceptions.
Practitioners are permitted to communicate only the most basic factual information and even then, under stringent conditions.
For instance, a doctor may inform existing patients or professional colleagues of a change of address, the opening of a new practice or the dissolution of a partnership — but only through private notices, sent in sealed envelopes, addressed directly to the recipient.
Keep Reading
- Revisiting Majaivana’s last show… ‘We made huge losses’
- Too young to marry: The secret world of child brides
- Edutainment mix: The nexus of music and cultural identity
- ChiTown acting mayor blocks election
Public announcements are explicitly forbidden.
Similarly, doctors may appear in a telephone directory, but the information allowed is limited to their name, address, telephone number and professional qualifications.
Any slogans, claims of expertise, description of specialised services or language that can be interpreted as promotional are strictly prohibited.
Names and qualifications may also appear in official professional lists published by regulatory bodies, but nowhere else.
The law does allow practitioners to write articles, give public speeches or deliver lectures on medical or public health topics.
However, these activities must be strictly educational or informational.
The moment such communication is perceived as promoting a service — even indirectly — it risks being classified as unlawful advertising.
In effect, this legal regime belongs to a pre-digital era.
It was crafted for a time before websites, social media, online health platforms and cross-border medical tourism.
Interpreted literally, it criminalises behaviour that is standard practice across the world: informing the public about available services, specialised procedures or centres of excellence.
This backwardness has real consequences.
Zimbabwe has hospitals and clinics offering highly specialised and advanced services — some at par with those found in major international destinations.
Yet many citizens are unaware of their existence.
As a result, patients often travel to countries such as India to seek procedures that are available locally, simply because they do not know they can be done here.
This contradiction is particularly glaring given Zimbabwe’s stated ambition to become a medical tourism hub, even within southern Africa.
That aspiration cannot be realised when medical practitioners are legally gagged from communicating what the country has to offer.
The issue has not gone unnoticed at policy level.
During the presentation of the 2025 National Budget in November 2024, the Finance minister acknowledged the need to revise this legislation to allow the responsible advertising of medical services for the benefit of the nation.
Yet the process of reform has been frustratingly slow.
Time is not on our side.
We live in an era that demands speed, adaptability and innovation.
While other countries are leveraging on technology to expand access to healthcare and attract patients, Zimbabwe remains stuck in a regulatory mindset that treats transparency as a crime.
There is, therefore, an urgent need for reform.
The current Act should be repealed and replaced with a modern statutory instrument, engineered by the Health and Child Care ministry, which allows ethical, factual and regulated advertising by registered medical practitioners.
In the interim, regulatory bodies — particularly the Medical and Dental Private Practitioners Council of Zimbabwe — should exercise restraint and avoid penalising practitioners while the matter is being addressed.
Zimbabwe has a great deal to offer in healthcare.
We should not be a country where cardiothoracic surgery can be performed locally, yet citizens remain unaware because speaking about it is punishable by law.
This legislation must be repealed as a matter of urgency — not only for doctors, but for patients, the healthcare system, and the nation as a whole.