Kenyan doctors insist on threefold pay rise

Doctors on Tuesday maintained they had to get 300 per cent salary increase if they are to drop their plans to stage a countrywide strike on December 5.

That would nearly put them at par with their counterparts in southern African countries who enjoy far better salaries and allowances.

Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) said raising salaries to the level of those given to doctors in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa would reverse the unending exodus of Kenyans to those countries.

According to the union, a doctor in Namibia or South Africa takes home seven times the salary of his counterpart in Kenya per month.

The one in Botswana takes home three times what a Kenyan doctor at the same level earns, according to the union’s pay analysis.

It is due to this huge disparity in the regional pay scale that mass exodus of doctors from Kenya to Namibia, South Africa and Botswana continues unabated, KMPDU secretary general Boniface Chitayi says.

According to the Medical and Dentists Board boss Daniel Yumbia, about 64 per cent of those who were leaving for the other countries were seeking better employment opportunities.

It is for this reason that the doctors in Kenya’s public hospitals are rooting for a new scheme of service that will see the gross salary of the lowest paid rise to Sh180,000 up from the current Sh60,000.

Basic salary

But even with this push for a 300 per cent increase, the doctors will still be badly off, compared to their peers in Botswana who take home Sh219,458 in basic salary at entry level.

In Namibia, the doctor at intern level earns a basic pay of Sh312,000, while in South Africa he takes home Sh340,191.

The highest paid doctor in Kenya — a medical specialist II — earns a gross salary of Sh130, 000 which is set to increase to Sh520,000 if the push to increase their pay is heeded.

KMPDU says this new scheme for the 2,300 doctors in the country’s public hospitals is long overdue.

A medical officer earns Sh76,000 after one year into employment and Sh100,000 after three years in public service where they are referred to as senior medical officers.

“Efforts to have the situation reversed have been met with false promissory letters from the government in the last two decades or so,” said Dr Chitayi.

The doctors who have threatened to go on strike next month from December 5, say this increase will only affect their basic pay during daytime work hours of 8am to 5pm. (READ: Doctors issue strike threat over low pay)

Their union further proposed that all other hours they walk around the hospitals in the dead of the night must be compensated at a rate 1.5 times the amount paid during normal working hours.

“If our demands are not met, doctors will stay at home, neither will there be any emergency calls unless the government calls us for negotiation in which case we are ready,” Dr Chitayi says.

On Monday, Medical Services minister Anyang’ Nyong’o invited the union for discussions aimed at forestalling the imminent crisis in the public hospitals. (READ: Doctors hold crisis talks to avert strike)

The KMPDU also wants the government to start giving the doctors other allowances as risk, hardship on top of medical, house commuter and non-practising allowances that they currently enjoy.

Dr Chitayi argues that doctors are highly exposed to risky infections, drugs, radiation and even assault from mentally unsound patients, yet they did not enjoy any risk allowance like other public servants.

They are also proposing that the doctors be given a hardship allowances for those in arid and semi-arid areas equivalent to 30 per cent of their basic salaries.

Further, they are demanding, alongside their families, to have an inpatient cover of Sh10 million and a medical allowance of Sh10, 000 to cover outpatient treatment.

“But the irony of the noble profession is that doctors offer services which they cannot themselves afford,” he says, noting that they enjoyed a medical allowance of paltry Sh1,740 per month, the lowest among public servants.

Doctors train for five years in the universities, unlike most degrees that take a maximum of four years.

But an increased pay cheque is not all the doctors are agitating for, as they also want the government to start enforcing the Abuja Declaration of 2001 where the African Heads of State pledged to allocate 15 per cent of their national budgets to healthcare.

“Ten years after signing this agreement, Kenya is one of the few countries in Africa which have refused to raise its budgetary allocation to healthcare, resulting in inadequate hospitals which cannot serve the growing population.”

Dr Chitayi reckons that hospitals lack basic investigative services like x-rays, hemograms and biochemistry procedures, and have reduced the practice of medicine to an intelligent gamble.

The end result of failure to allocate funds to the health sector has resulted in a health system that is worse than it was 20 years ago, he argues.

According to the Wealth Health Organisation, maternal mortality rate in Kenya stood at 452 per 100,000 live births, while last year, the rate stood at 530.

“After twenty years of bad policies and neglect of this sector, we are worse off than we were in 1980 when our maternal mortality rate was 492,” Dr Chitayi says.

He contrasts this with the United States that has a maternal mortality rate of 17, and Libya, even with the undemocratic leadership of Muammar Gadaffi, that has a rate of 40.

Furthermore, there is a shortage of 40,000 doctors in the country to meet the ration of 1 doctor per 1,000 patients as required by conventional standards.

“The social pillar of the country developmental blue print — Vision 2030 has outlined health care as a key area that should be developed,” Dr Chitayi says.

He notes that while using State resources to get the best medical care for themselves and their families in foreign hospitals, Kenyan leaders do not care about the deplorable state of the hospitals.

As a result, it is estimated that 200,000 Kenyans die annually out of deaths that can be prevented.

Only last year, the government stopped funding doctors interested in pursuing post-graduate studies, with those who were already halfway through their studies having to halt them.

He adds that these demands are made with the understanding that nurses and clinical officers suffer a similar fate and that “they also require an urgent review of their scheme of service to motivate them to deliver quality healthcare to Kenyans”.

The private sector must also take steps to start implementing the labour laws and end the on-going human rights abused in these institutions as poor pay and long working hours are also found in the institutions.