Mozambique: Health professionals threaten to strike again

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Mozambique: Health professionals threaten to strike again

11:48 CAT | 11 Mar 2025

File photo: O País

Mozambique’s Association of United and Solidary Health Professionals of Mozambique (APSUSM) announced today (10-03) that it would resume its strike indefinitely if the government does not respond to the concerns troubling the profession.

The threat comes two years after the agreements were signed between the government and the association. The last strike was announced on April 29, 2024, with a view to pressuring the government to implement the agreements signed with health professionals in June and August 2023. However, after negotiations with the government, APSUSM suspended the strike so that the agreed issues could be resolved.

This time, APSUSM says it has not deviated from its course, as it has also appealed to the government to comply with the agreements signed in 2023, by the end of March, regarding the payment of overtime, shifts, exclusivity, definitive restructuring of the general and specific regime of the national health system and compliance with the letter of demands, as well as the payment of fixed salaries, and on fixed dates.

“We asked the government to resolve all the demands of health professionals by the end of March,” the president of APSUM, Anselmo Muchave, told a press conference today (10-03) in Maputo. “We will stop our activities, because we are the pioneers in the demonstrations and we always have new strategies to make the functioning of health units even worse.”

Muchave says that the government has a clear lack of interest in improving the working conditions of health professionals and in providing decent health care to the population, even after making a commitment to reverse this situation, which is only getting worse.

“Unfortunately, our health units are getting worse, with access to basic health care being deficient and worsened by the lack of medicines to treat the most common diseases, forcing patients to buy from private pharmacies, sacrificing their income,” he said.

Muchave also laments the lack of hospital equipment and motivation among all professionals. “It’s been about two years since we said out loud that our health units are suffering from a lack of medical and surgical equipment, that the laboratories are operating without reagents, and that there are no plates for printing X-rays.”

“Healthcare professionals are infected by handling serious illnesses without proper protection, such as cleaning gloves, high boots for maternity wards and operating theatres, in addition to being mistreated by the public, who film us claiming that we do not want to provide medicines inside the healthcare units,” he added.

Muchave also expressed concern about the quality of food for patients, which “remains a disgrace, although it reaches 99% of them, unlike that of healthcare professionals, who spend 24 hours working in healthcare units without food”.

He said that the class feels excluded from the 100-day government plans, which from 2022 to 2025 do not include the healthcare professional package. “The government practically discarded healthcare professionals, while we had consensus that they should have been implemented last year, and the government left it aside, similar to administrative acts, which should not be done at the government’s discretion, because when we finish the course, we go straight to our work sectors,” Muchave detailed.

Despite complaints about the government, the association acknowledged some actions taken to improve working conditions. “We are not going to take away credit for some of the things they have done, because even now they are distributing uniforms. The government spent money on buying them.” In addition, the association asked the government to pay it special attention, as it was the only one that did not join the post-election demonstration, and “we even had two colleagues die outside the health units, but the government is not saying anything about that”.

Source: AIM