Saturday, December 10, 2016
NAIROBI – The Kenyan government resorted to deploying military doctors at the country’s main referral hospital in Nairobi as a doctors’ strike entered the fifth day.
Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) doctors have been deployed to Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi to handle emergency cases as the government seeks to negotiate with the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union.
The union reported that 290 specialists/consultants joined the ongoing health workers’ strike on Thursday, prompting the government to react by sending in emergency medics.
KDF spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Njuguna told local media that the military doctors were offering services at the hospital to “save lives”.
Meanwhile, President Uhuru Kenyatta said he was confident that the doctor’s dispute would be resolved soon, and urged doctors to have compassion so that patients who depended on them did not suffer.
According to the presidential strategic communications unit, Kenyatta said a solution would be reached that recognised the important role that doctors and nurses played.
Kenyatta was speaking on Friday after commissioning modern medical equipment at the Kericho County Hospital, including dialysis machines, theatres, and a radiology centre.
“The government is working hard to improve medical services in the country but this equipment will be useless without you,” he told the doctors.
Medics in Kenya’s public hospitals have been on a nationwide strike since Monday protesting against the government’s failure to implement a three-year old collective bargaining agreement.
Health services in Kenya were devolved to the new counties, causing protests by health workers who rejected the move, saying health services should remain with national government.
Speaking to African News Agency, the medical union's central branch secretary Dr Goody Gor said doctors and other health workers faced a lot of interference by politicians at the county level.
“You get a politician coming into the hospital and telling you to give priority treatment to his relatives at the expense of other patients,” Gor said.
“We are also forced to recommend patients to get drugs from the hospital pharmacy even when those drugs are not the right ones. This is for the politicians to show off that the hospitals in their county are dispensing drugs to the locals, even when those drugs are inadequate for treatment,” he said.
Doctors have taken to social media to create personalised short stories of their experiences in working in public hospitals. Many have recounted how, long before the strike, patients have been dying because of a lack of facilities and resources, ranging from surgical gloves to blood banks to oxygen and other basic medical equipment.
For the first time in Kenya, the public have sided with the medics and a hashtag on Twitter in Kiswahili #LipaKamaTender has been trending for several days.
The Twitter call demands that the government pays the doctors their dues just the same way it pays “conmen” billions for government tenders. The doctors have said they will not relent until the 2013 agreement is implemented in full.