[ad_1]
Providing universal healthcare is one of four priorities of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration.
The others are food security, affordable housing and manufacturing. Access to quality healthcare is a prerequisite for national development.
Economic growth is predicated on the health of citizens. It is the healthy who can engage meaningfully in productive ventures.
Despite express intention, providing quality health remains a major challenge.
A survey conducted by this newspaper across the country and published elsewhere in this edition presents a sorry state of affairs.
The public healthcare system is broken and dysfunctional. Hospitals and dispensaries operate without basic facilities.
Drugs and other provisions are sorely lacking. Being sick is a death sentence for many.
Constitutionally, healthcare is a function of the national and county governments.
The national government’s key responsibility is formulating policy and managing the main referral hospitals, currently Kenyatta and Moi Teaching in Eldoret.
Other levels of hospitals are managed by county governments. Devolving medical services to counties was predicated on the premise that since health affects people at the individual level, it is better managed at the grassroots.
Some gains have been recorded. Relatively a growing number of hospitals and dispensaries have been upgraded and expanded by county governments.
Even so, improvements may have been made on physical structures but what matters most — health personnel, drugs and consumables — have not been addressed.
Most health facilities across the counties are short-staffed and even those in service are poorly managed. Which explains the perennial strikes by doctors and nurses.
As our reports demonstrate, the resources are inadequate. Worse, the allocated cash hardly serves the purpose.
For the resources are looted, misused or misdirected. In the circumstances, the sick are left without options.
Absence of good medical care in public health facilities means the ordinary citizen has nowhere to turn to for medical care. Private health facilities are unjustifiably expensive.
The whole purpose of declaring universal healthcare a priority was to galvanise resources and all the energies to the agenda.
What obtains on the ground, however, shows that it is all talk but no action.
Some interventions such as the multibillion-shilling leased equipment scheme, deployment of doctors from Cuba, waiver of fees for pregnant women or enrolling everyone to the National Hospital Insurance Fund have not translated into tangible benefits to the population.
Except for a few regions like Makueni, which stands out as a textbook case study for universal healthcare, the rest of the country is hurting.
[ad_2]
