By Thandiwe Garusa

THE ZIMBABWE Medical Awards Trust will this weekend host an inaugural ceremony to honour medical professionals who have dedicated themselves to offer help to the nation especially during the Covid-19 pandemic period.

The awards will honour practitioners who passed away during the pandemic and pioneers in the medical field.

Zimbabwe Medical Awards chairperson Josephat Chiripanyanga said this is the first for Zimbabwe to host such such awards.

“Here in Zimbabwe, there are no awards that are being given to medical professionals be it doctors, nurses, pharmacists, or scientists,” he told NewZimbabwe.com.

“We also noticed that in other countries they honour their legends, so we decided to bring that home.  Locally, we see there are awards given to other professionals like soccer, modelling, and we decided to do the same.

“This is the inaugural ceremony of the medical awards. This has never been done at such a scale. There used to be minor awards given to a few people, but there has never been an awards ceremony that honours or gives credit to the medical professionals across all boards in Zimbabwe,” Chiripanyanga said.

He added: “We also want to honor our Covid-19 heroes, the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and laboratory scientists that passed away during the pandemic. We want to give them posthumous awards.

“On top of this, we are honouring pioneer doctors, nurses that were the first. We want to award the first Zimbabwean doctor, the first Zimbabwean nurse, surgeon, orthopedic and health ministers from 1980 to date.”