Stop experimenting with our people’s health
What you need to know:
The countries whose health systems we keep admiring did not achieve this by looking to foreign countries for help in training their health workforce.
They invested heavily in their health systems and continue to produce a health workforce attuned to the needs of their own population.
Last year, after talks between the Kenyan government and its Cuban counterpart, a deal was reached to import Cuban doctors and send our doctors for specialised training in Cuba. This decision was arrived at without consulting local experts.
IGNORED
Notwithstanding this, those of us in the health sector analysed the implications of this arrangement and came up with the verdict that all the evidence showed that this move would at best be unhelpful to Kenyans and, at worst, harmful. This advice was of course ignored.
On the eve of Jamhuri Day, which was incidentally celebrated internationally as the World Universal Health Coverage Day, the Kenyan government announced that they had entered into yet another deal with the government of Barbados to train Kenyan doctors because the country allegedly has ‘an excellent health system’. In exchange, Kenya agreed to accept “medical interns” from Barbados so that they can observe and learn local practice standards and procedures. Kenyan interns are expected to “see for themselves how their colleagues in Barbados take care of patients”.
For over a decade now, Kenyan politicians seem to have decided that the only thing they can experiment with is the health of their people. There was political unanimity during the constitutional negotiations in Naivasha in early 2010 that the only significant social service that would be devolved to the counties was health.
DISCONNECT
Suggestions to create a Health Service Commission to manage human resources for health were dismissed as “anti-devolution”, and the disarray associated with the precipitate abandonment of the health system by government was rationalised as teething problems under the new constitution. Today, after experiencing these problems for almost a decade, it seems that we are becoming more rational, and the recently released Building Bridges Initiative report indicated that Kenyans now want a Health Service Commission formed to standardise the management of the scarce human resources for health. Unfortunately, as the people arrive at the realisation that their health is too important to be experimented with, our politicians continue to display a complete disconnect between policy and practice.
WORKFORCE
The decision to train our doctors in Barbados and have their interns come to Kenya to learn medicine was made with little input from health experts and educators and will only serve to make an already bad situation worse. There are about a dozen medical schools in Kenya, and they are all capable of training the best doctors in the world.
The countries whose health systems we keep admiring did not achieve this by looking to foreign countries for help in training their health workforce. They invested heavily in their health systems and continue to produce a health workforce attuned to the needs of their own population. That is the path we must follow if we are to improve our health system.
Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]
