The inaugural Zimbabwe Medical Awards, which will be held on the 4th of December in Harare, will celebrate pioneers and heroes in the medical field who exhibited courage and bravery during the COVID-19 era.
The award ceremony, to be held at the Harare International Conference Centre will run under the theme, “Honoring Greatness.”
Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Jasper Chimedza will be the event’s guest of honour.
“We decided to start the Zimbabwe Medical Awards when we noticed that here in Zimbabwe, there are no awards being given to medical professionals, be it doctors, nurses, pharmacists or lab scientists,” said Dr Josephat Chiripanyanga, board chairperson of the Zimbabwe Medical Awards Trust.
The inaugural awards will have at least 40 categories across the medical fraternity, which boasts of over 10,000 professionals and specialists ‘working tirelessly to save the nation.’
Dr Chiripanyanga reiterated: “On top of this, we are honouring pioneer doctors, nurses that were the first. We want to award the first Zimbabwean nurse, the first Zimbabwean doctor, the first surgeon, the first orthopedic. We are also honouring our ministers of health from 1980 to date.
“Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also want to honour our COVID-19 heroes; the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab scientists who passed away during this pandemic. We also want to give them posthumous awards,” he added.
Dr Chiripanyanga bewailed challenges faced in putting the awards ceremony together due to unavailability of critical historical information on the profession.
“You will be shocked how difficult it is for you to get to find who was the first Zimbabwean orthopedic surgeon, or even the first Zimbabwean nurse. That information is not easily available on the internet or anywhere. So we want to do this so that we get this information to be public. This is our history as a nation.”
In the following editions of the Zimbabwe Medical Awards, medical professionals will be honored on merit, in consultation with the various medical societies and associations in the country.
The Zimbabwe Medical Awards Trust is handled by the experienced doctors, medical professionals, specialists and nurses. The aim of the trust is to motivate medical professionals and specialists through appreciating their dedication to community services.
