MEDICAL evacuations from Zambia are not a preserve of politicians and their relatives, Ministry of Health spokesperson Dr Abel Kabalo has said.

Some quarters of society have recently questioned the criteria for medical evacuations observing that only politicians have enjoyed the privilege.

But speaking in an interview, Dr Kabalo said all citizens were eligible for evacuation for specialist treatment if there was no expertise to treat their cases.

He said last year, about 88 patients were referred outside the country for specialist treatment and that more than five of them were politicians.

“The only thing that you must know is that politicians’ evacuations are publicised but to maintain confidentiality and the privacy of the patients we do not advertise people that we send out,” Dr Kabalo said adding, “otherwise evacuations are not a preserve of politicians and their relatives, there is a lot more patients that we send outside the country silently.”

Dr Kabalo said the Ministry of Health was working towards reducing the number of evacuations but noted that it would not be an overnight job.

He said in 2017 the ministry evacuated 140 patients but recorded a drastic reduction of referrals last year.

Dr Kabalo said the Ministry of Health was working towards modern medical infrastructure and acquisition of specialised medical equipment.

“Not only are we building infrastructure but we are also training our experts and ultimately we would like to see a situation where all the evacuations stop so that we do most of the things here in the country,” he said.

“This has been demonstrated by the teams we have assembled that are doing quite a lot of things that we were not able to do a few years ago. For example open and closed surgeries, and we have done more than 17 of those in the country.”

Dr Kabalo said the ministry had assembled a team of cardiologists and cardiac surgeons to handle knife edge operations.

“Operations like the separation of Siamese twins, in the past we could not do that in the country. We used to export those ones but we are doing it with locally assembled experts. The Reno transplant that we did last year and a lot more are going to be done so as a nation and as a sector, as a Ministry of Health, we are moving in the right direction to ensure that we do most of the specialised operations, knife edge operations in the country,” he said.

Dr Kabalo explained that the ministry had come up with a strategic national health plan whose objective was modernisation of facilities and ensuring training of more than 500 specialists by 2021.