Hospitals imprison patients
THE Kenyatta National Hospital is East Africa’s biggest medical institution, home to more than a dozen donorfunded projects with international partners – a “Centre of Excellence”, says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The hospital’s website proudly proclaims its motto “We Listen We Care”, along with photos of smiling doctors, a vaccination campaign and staffers holding aloft a gold trophy at an awards ceremony.
But there are no pictures of Robert Wanyonyi, shot and paralysed in a robbery more than a year ago. Kenyatta will not allow him to leave the hospital because he cannot pay his bill of nearly 4 million Kenyan shillings (R574 000). He is trapped in his fourthfloor bed, unable to go to India, where he believes doctors might help him.
At Kenyatta National Hospital and at an astonishing number of other hospitals around the world, if you don’t pay up, you don’t go home.
The hospitals often illegally detain patients long after they should be medically discharged, using armed guards, locked doors and even chains to hold those who have not settled their accounts. Mothers and babies are sometimes separated. Even death does not guarantee release: Kenyan hospitals and morgues are holding hundreds of bodies until families can pay their loved ones’ bills, government officials say.
Dozens of doctors, nurses, health experts, patients and administrators told The Associated Press of imprisonments in hospitals in at least 30 other countries, including Nigeria and Congo, China and Thailand, Lithuania and Bulgaria, and others in Latin America and the Middle East.
“What’s striking about this issue is that the more we look for this, the more we find it,” said Dr Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, who was not involved in the British research.
“It’s probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that this affects worldwide. It is not something that is only happening in a small number of countries, but the problem is that nobody is looking at this and it is way off the public health radar.”
During several August visits to Kenyatta National Hospital, AP witnessed armed guards in military fatigues standing watch over patients, and saw where detainees slept on bedsheets on the floor in cordoned-off rooms.
Guards prevented one worried father from seeing his detained toddler, all despite a court ruling years ago that found the detentions were illegal.
The practice appears to be most prevalent in countries with fragile, underfunded health systems where there is little government accountability. | AP BRITISH police are hunting a shoplifter stealing beer who bears a striking resemblance to Ross Geller, the character played by David Schwimmer on the TV show Friends.
Schwimmer tweeted: “Officers, I swear it wasn’t me. I was in New York.” He wished police well with the investigation.