Playing Russian roulette with patients’ lives

Governments, the world over, spend a lot of money to provide health care out of the recognition that people constitute the greatest resource for development.

It therefore follows that a sick or ailing population is an impediment in all aspects of growth.

Similarly people seek medical care when they are sick because beyond the physical pain, illness does not just threaten their lives but also impacts negatively on their productivity.

As a developing country, Kenya is still grappling with providing medical care to a population half of which is below the poverty line.

Depending on their financial status, Kenyans will seek medical help in subsidised government hospitals and dispensaries or the many private hospitals and clinics across the land.

All these medical facilities are run by professionals trained to deal with various ailments and when people turn to them they have faith in them and their expertise.

It is now emerging that unknown to the unsuspecting public who attend hospitals for various reasons, curable sickness routinely turn fatal because medical staff regularly miss diagnoses either because they are not equipped with the tools to carry out exhaustive examinations of patients or they are too casual in discharging their duties.

On the authority of experts, where treatment is carried out without proper examination and proper use of laboratories, the patients are placing themselves in danger.

Accurate diagnosis is missed out in 50 per cent of the cases where no tests are carried out.

It would of course be unreasonable to expect medical staff to carry out accurate diagnosis if they do not have the right training and equipment.

It is common knowledge that many government hospitals, particularly those in the rural areas, operate with only rudimentary equipment.

The facilities are also understaffed and therefore unprepared to cope with the large number of patients who visit them everyday.

In this situation, the only doctor or clinical officer at the district level will hardly have the time to carry out exhaustive examination because he or she is under pressure to see as many patients as possible.

In these high pressure situations, the doctor or clinical officer asks the patient what is bothering them, and relying on their experience writes down a prescription and dispatches the patient to the pharmacy and calls out for the next patient.

The danger here is that some ailments have similar symptoms and a wrong prescription will most certainly send the patient to an early grave.

A patient suffering from pneumonia but treated for malaria will have few chances of survival. Despite being killers, both diseases are curable but only when accurate diagnosis is made.

In many cases, doctors and hospitals have been able to get away with this kind of negligence because the families of victims do not have the means to investigate the actual cause of death, neither do they have knowledge that would enable them question the doctor’s ability and professional conduct.

This, however, is changing. Kenyans are more educated, more informed and keenly aware of their rights and avenues through which they can pursue professionals whose negligence causes them unwarranted suffering or snuffs out the lives of their loved ones.

Cases of complaints filed with Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board are piling up each day and the board can hardly cope.

In simple terms, the government will be hit by waves of expensive lawsuits.

By all accounts, the government does not have the money to spend on compensation of claims resulting from professional negligence.

It would be more prudent to move with speed to equip professionals with the right tools to carry their duties and at the same time enforce professional discipline among medical staff.

This, in turn, will restore the confidence of the public in health institutions that are funded at a great cost by taxpayers.