This UNDP Human Development Report graph shows the decline of Zimbabwe's Human Development Index rating -- a number based on three indicators: health, education and income. Photo: UNHDR

When inflation climbs so high that your national bank notes lose their value, how do you pay for a visit to the doctor?

In Zimbabwe, it’s back to the barter system, according to a recent article in The New York Times. In response to record hyperinflation that rendered the country’s currency useless in 2008, one hospital has gotten creative and employed an innovative approach to payment: allowing patients to pay for medical services with peanuts, soybeans, and other crops or with chickens and livestock. As Kathy McCarty, who oversees the operations of the unique Chidamoyo Hospital notes, “[w]e literally are providing medical services for peanuts!”

Zimbabwe has since endorsed the U.S. dollar as the new currency, but as one patient remarked to Celia Dugger of The New York Times, “[i]t’s very difficult to get this famous dollar that people are talking about.”

Accepting alternative methods of payment has permitted this hospital to continue operations when most of the government-funded hospitals closed because hyperinflation made paying staff salaries impossible. The hospital uses the peanuts exchanged for services to supplement the nutrition of those admitted as inpatients.

Maybe more hospitals should adopt such policies as Zimbabwe has the lowest Human Development Index rating for 2010 Human Development Report data set and “is also one of only three countries in the world to be worse off now on combined measures of health, education and income than it was 40 years ago.” Just in case you're curious, the other two countries are the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia. But neither have seen the decline that Zimbabwe has seen and both are currently on the mend.