Doctors stage protest over unemployment, lack of drugs in hospitals

Doctors in Nairobi on Tuesday staged a protest in the streets, lamenting over what they termed as the “deplorable state of healthcare in public hospitals.”

The doctors, under the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU), embarked on a peaceful procession from the Kenyatta National Hospital to the Ministry of Health and Council of Governors (COG) offices where they delivered a petition detailing their cries.

The medics claimed that over 4,000 of their counterparts remain unemployed, adding that most public health facilities across the country lack essential drugs and medical supplies.

“These challenges have significantly compromised the ability of our overburdened and demotivated healthcare professionals to deliver effective and timely medical services to the citizens of our nation,” KMPDU Secretary General Dr. Davji Atellah stated.

“But more worrying hasn’t really been the fact that no one employs health workers. What hurts is the deliberate removal of instruments that basically protect the right of health workers to be employed, to be trained, to be remunerated effectively, to be deployed and to be socially protected. The CBA is abandoned. The schemes of service no longer mean anything.”

The doctors’ union boss hit out at the Ministry of Health for failing to guide counties in implementing the Human Resources Procedures Manual unveiled by the Public Service Commission (PSC) in 2016, further that the career progression stipulations have also been abandoned.

He also slammed county public service boards, which he described as “evil groupings of dysfunctional incompetence” that have only served to cause chaos within the health sector.

Dr. Atellah alleged that the county boards had gone rogue, and turned into wealth generating avenues where Kenyans seeking jobs are extorted for kickbacks.

“Today we want to remind the country that; life and death is not devolved. That policy is not devolved. That standards are not devolved. That treasury is not devolved. That legislation is not devolved and that suffering has never ever been devolved. What is devolved is corruption where Kenyans today have to pay colossal amounts of money to get any job opportunity in the counties,” he stated.

“Today we call out all these evil groupings of dysfunctional incompetence that for 10 years have done nothing other than harming the health sector. County Public Service Boards have no capacity and have no good intent to improve healthcare for any citizen and by extension they have been become little money collecting avenues for individuals who take advantage of suffering Kenyans in the name of giving them jobs.”