Doctors and nurses should get a dose of the medicine given to teachers

Striking doctors and the nurses who work beside them in public hospitals are heartless people.

Despite taking the Hypocrites Oath, which is another version of the vow of poverty, they have abandoned their posts at 2,000 public hospitals around the country unless they get more money.

They are demanding a 300 per cent pay rise, backdated to June 2013, as if they are hairdressers or cousins of the President.

So far, 20 people have died in public hospitals in the absence of a health professional.

Doctors, nurses and clinical officers also do not want to work long hours or seven days a week, instead demanding that the government hires 1,200 doctors every year.

It is unconscionable that polished professionals educated on the public purse, with years of training and refinement, still want to employ Francis Atwoli tactics, spewing saliva to obtain a pay rise.

Marching with placards, dustcoats and surgical masks is the stuff of uneducated country bumpkins, not medical professionals who are expected to negotiate in English.

Instead of treating people, injecting them with chemicals, and operating on them, health workers have become political agitators complaining about corruption, how tired they are, how the machines do not work, the beds are insufficient, and supplies short.

They are now complaining about frustration and being demoralised even as 50 patients with mental illness go away without official leave.

DEATH RATE
Doctors have been salivating whenever they read about the sovereign bond money, the amounts spent on tenders at the ministry of Health and the National Youth Service.

They should be told that the money so far raised from public debt is for building the Standard Gauge Railway, not to be squandered on booze, cigarettes and other creature comforts for medical workers.

They should be invited to try their luck in the private sector, where they will be worked to the bone, and will not even have time to run a backstreet clinic.

Until the doctors went on strike, a person was less likely to die in Kenya than in many other places around the world.

Outside Libya, Egypt, Morocco and Mauritius, there is no country on the African continent where the annual death rate is lower than Kenya’s.

The crude death rate is just under 6.8 per 1,000 each year, translating to 280,000 deaths annually.

South Africa, which pretends to be a second world country, has 17 deaths per 1,000 every year.

People never die in hospitals when doctors and nurses are working.

As soon as the strike got under way, the suffering of patients multiplied.

On arriving at a hospital without medical staff, the pangs of pain would flash in the patient’s body like the klaxon on an ambulance, generating needless untold suffering.

A SIMILAR TREATMENT

Now, numerous patients are being forced to go to backstreet clinics, self-medicate or visit the witchdoctor in a fashion that could undermine Kenya’s standing in the world.

Soon, the greed for money among public service doctors is going to infect health workers in the private sector to down their tools in solidarity.

At times like this, the government has no choice but to adopt a hardline stance in dealing with doctors.

It should withdraw the Sh36,000 lump sum January 2017 pay rise offer and employ hard tackling techniques.

Every one of the 20 deaths that have occurred in the five days that the strike has lasted will be on the doctors’ conscience.

The union officials should be charged with murder, or in the alternative, causing death through negligence.

At about this time last year, the country’s 250,000 cunning teachers tested the government and discovered that they were no match for its guile, staying power and appeal to the masses.

The doctors and nurses should receive a dose of the same medicine.

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