Doctors’ despair drives Kenya’s longest medical strike

NAIROBI: The first patient Cynthia Waliaula lost was a baby who stopped breathing while she carried him in her arms through the hospital, desperately trying to find an oxygen tank.

Barely out of medical school, the bright- eyed young doctor quickly learned that many of the techniques she had spent five years studying meant nothing in a world where there was neither equipment nor drugs.

Waliaula, 25, is one of thousands of Kenyan public sector doctors currently engaged in the country’s longest-ever medical strike which has dragged on for the last month and a half, demanding a tripling of salaries and better working conditions.

“When you graduate you are really excited. You are just ready to go out into the world but you get there and you realise a lot of things you were taught aren’t there,” she told AFP.

She said the three-month- old baby who died in her arms had pneumonia and was malnourished, but could easily have been saved with the right treatment. However, at the time, her hospital in the central Kenyan town of Isiolo had only two oxygen tanks.

“I think every Kenyan doctor has had to decide who gets oxygen. You are forced to play god.”

Waliaula’s harrowing tales of working without even basic drugs, such as penicillin, are not isolated cases in the public sector. Meanwhile, Kenya’s private hospitals – unaffordable to much of the population – are some of the best on the continent.

This week Kenyan doctors took to Twitter in a bid to explain why they are digging their heels in while public hospitals are paralysed by the strike, and why they refused a 40-percent pay rise offer.

Under the hashtag üMyBadDoctorExperience, the medics recounted experiences of being forced to work without drugs, gloves or electricity and under severe staff shortages that left many on the verge of collapse.

One Twitter user, a doctor who gave only his first name, Anthony, told AFP he had once been in the middle of a Caesarean section when the lights went out.

“The back-up generator was out of fuel. We ended up using a Nokia phone flashlight (as the) torch available had expired batteries.” — AFP