Letter from a Cuban hospital bed: Let Kenyans choose

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s visit to Cuba in early March yielded an agreement to bring 100 doctors from the Caribbean nation to Kenya. An idea could not have been timelier. Let me tell you why. 

My journey to Cuba has been winding and taxing. I have cumulatively spent about two years in hospital. One year in Kenya and 11 months in India, Dubai Healthcare City and now in Cuba.

I was at the end of the road when I landed in Cuba. I had said to myself that should it not work out I’ll know in my heart that I had given my best shot.

PATRIOTISM

In December 2017, I visited Cuba to do my groundwork and I now realise that we need to adopt new models for measuring happiness and progress, because Cuba is way ahead of many of the so-called first-world countries in numerous fields. Cubans are the happiest lot I ever met.

The social cohesion is unlike anything I ever saw or imagined feasible. Cubans are so colour-blind that they do not see a black, white or yellow person. Referring to someone as white or black does not carry the kind of connotation it does virtually everywhere else around the world. It’s hard to imagine that the population is 70 per cent white, 20 per cent black and 10 per cent mulatto. The patriotism of the people is something most governments on the planet only dream of.

TEST EXTENSIVELY

On February 2, I began my medical treatment in Cuba and in the past seven weeks I have achieved much more than I have in the two years I spent hospitalised.

I have come to see that the first step in healing is trust in your medical service provider. The Cuban doctors listen attentively, understand your past thoroughly, asking question after question and in the process bringing out things that had not consciously occurred to you as they truly want to be in harmony with you.

Based on your complaints and your well understood history, they test you so extensively that I even joked with them that they must know the number of cells in my body.

A treatment plan is then developed and subjected to discussions, not just within the institution but they even invite professors from other hospitals or academia to come and give their input. And all this is done efficiently and within hardly any time you are on the treatment plan.

AVAILABLE

The focus is on the patient. It is not about a doctor trying to be the star as the one who did it for you, or the hospital shining as the place where the treatment occurred. The patient is the star and all eyes are on your improvement.

I must confess that I found the amount of attention and focus overwhelming.

It is never about your social status, ability to pay, ethnicity or race; it’s all about serving the patient. The doctors are readily and easily available to consult. The nurses and therapists are forever waiting on you and ever willing to go the extra mile for you.

I also found that they are keenly interested in learning the why, whereas curing seems to be the focus in Kenya and indeed around the world and is celebrated as a victory. In Cuba the approach seems to be that treatment is taken as a failure of prevention or management. What did we fail to do that someone fell sick?

UNPARALLELED

Many in Kenya feel that the focus of the medicare providers is in maximising how much they can get from you before they let you go. That their care is determined by your ability to pay, not your need to get healing. Falling ill in Kenya is usually the end of people’s financial stability; rich families have been ruined.

My life, and those of countless others that I have encountered on the road to Havana, has been utterly destabilised. The amount of emotional, social and financial capital demanded by medical requirements is unparalleled.

Whereas everyone has a right to earn a decent living, what would be expected when a doctor owns matatus, a hardware store, is building an apartment block, has a butchery? Every business person will tell you that running multiple businesses usually subjects you to constant cash-flow pressure. That’s why heart attacks are more prevalent in the upper segments of our societies.

CONSULTATION FEE

When you walk into a doctor’s office and he has a choice between prescribing a treatment plan, which would make him earn money from three consultation fee visits as opposed to a half million down payment for admission and surgery, what action plan would the doctor be expected to suggest if the contractor needs 100 bags of cement urgently and one of the matatus got an engine knock?

Why is it that there is a conflict of interest in some professions whereas it's okay for a doctor, nurse or physiotherapist to open a private clinic and offer similar services while working for government where they are expected to serve all selflessly? Is it humanely possible that they will do all to sort out the public in public institutions when they have private practices that need a steady stream of clients to keep running?

COMPARE

We can bring a dream list of all the drugs and equipment required in all government medical institutions, but this will only be truly effective if there is a complete change in the mind-set of the medical providers and an overhaul in the structure of our medical service system.

Bring on the Cuban doctors. Kenyans need a choice. They need to be able to compare. They need to experience the pure ethos of the medical profession.

Let the Cuban doctors challenge our providers that there may be a change in the mind-set. Let us give Kenyans the ability to choose whom to see. It is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

Mr Mbugua is the CEO Realcom Company Limited