Choose your doctors, civil servants told

Public servants have until Wednesday to choose the hospital they would prefer to seek treatment under the government’s new comprehensive medical insurance cover.

This comes as the National Hospital Insurance Fund, which is providing the cover, prepares to send out Sh1.4 billion to the medical service providers that have for the past one-and-a-half months been treating the civil servants, under the scheme.

This will be the first payment the fund is making to the hospitals since the cover was unveiled last month.

Chief executive Richard Kerich on Monday said in an interview that the workers had been given till February 15 to choose the hospitals they would wish to go for outpatient treatment, a deadline which will not be extended.

“We are now in the process of making payments to the hospitals that have been treating the civil servants for the months of January, February and March. Despite this, I am aware that many of our public servants have not done what we had asked them,” he said.

Update records

“We are also asking them to update their records so that we can know exactly who is to benefit,” he added.

The cover which is also designed for disciplined forces, caters for the principal member, spouse and three dependent children under 18 years of age and up to a maximum of 25 years of age if still a full time student.

NHIF has also made a provision for employees who wish to cover additional members to pay extra premiums directly.

Under the scheme, each patient is required to pay Sh100 as co-payment in public hospitals, while those visiting high cost private hospitals will be required to pay Sh200, an arrangement that will also cover the National Youth Service and Kenya Prisons staff.

The decision to allow the public servants to make their own hospital choices comes after a meeting between the fund and the Kenya Union of Civil Servants last month.

This follows complaints by the workers that their names had either been assigned to hospitals they did not want or were far away from them.

Mr Kerich said no one had been forced to go to a specific hospital, explaining that the confusion may have arisen from a provisional list that had been compiled when the scheme took off.

Beyond expectations

Most of those who had utilised the scheme, he said, were satisfied with it.

“It’s uptake has been beyond our expectation. Many hospitals have in fact signed up with us and we can assure the public servants that they will be treated well,” he added.

And he allayed fears that the quality of services being provided to the public servants will be compromised due to the proliferation of commercial clinics that are now jostling to take advantage of the demand for the medical services that the new multi-billion shilling business is going to unleash.

Outpatient services

“Infact, the quality has indeed improved. Under the scheme, the more a patient visits the hospital, the more expensive it is for their respective medical facility. So they are striving hard to ensure that they offer the best treatment to their patients during their first visit,” said Mr Kerich.

He further clarified that civil servants or teachers seeking outpatient services will not be turned away because of lack of essential drugs stating that adequate plans to ensure this does not happen had already been made.

“We have asked the hospitals to use part of the money we give them for the treatment to buy adequate stocks of drugs for the patients,” he added.

Under the new scheme, the government will no longer pay medical allowance to civil servants.

Instead, the monthly allowance teachers and civil servants have been earning will now be channeled to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) as premiums.