Kenyans face health crisis amid doctor strike
Physicians walked off job in December to protest conditions
Nancy Ndirango grimaced in pain as she waited eight hours at a hospital with a broken right leg, the result of a fall on her way to school. There was no doctor to see her because they are on strike.
“People can die,” Ndirango, 17, complained. “(The government) should pay them what they’re asking, so they can get back to work.”
Ndirango’s plight at the eerily empty hospital in this town, about 50 miles north of the capital, Nairobi, is felt by millions of Kenyans as a national strike by 5,000 public-sector doctors demanding better pay and work conditions enters its fourth month. They walked off the job Dec. 5 to protest the government’s failure to make good on an agreement in 2013 to double salaries and hire thousands of new doctors to fill a severe shortage.
Even when physicians are working, this nation of 44 million has a critical lack of doctors: two for every 10,000 people, compared with 23 per 10,000, which the World Health Organization recommends.
The few Kenyans wealthy enough to afford private health insurance or pay their medical expenses out of pocket face long waits for care, too, as the country’s private hospitals cope with a huge backlog of patients turned away from public hospitals.
Doctors in Kenya earn as little as $1,200 per month in salary and benefits. The low pay forces many of them to seek work as private doctors in Kenya or in Europe or the USA, where they can earn better salaries.
In the USA, “I have friends who earn about $70,000 a year,” said Douglas Osoro, a pharmacist who was in his first year working at the hospital in Naivasha when the strike began. “Most of the people of Kenya depend on the public sector. Why not strengthen the system that serves them?”
“We’re working with a deficit of doctors already,” said Judy Karagania, a resident in opthalmology at Nairobi’s largest public hospital. “And our population is growing, so the deficit is likely to increase.
“Sadly, it’s the lower class that’s suffering,” she said.
A survey of 100 Kenyans last month by the mobile research platform mSurvey found 83% were directly affected by the strike, 74% were unhappy with the state of health care in the country and more than half knew someone who had sought treatment abroad because of inadequate services in Kenya.
“The problem goes far beyond the pay,” Osoro said. “One medical officer cannot see 100, 200 patients a day.”
Overcrowding can be a matter of life or death. Osoro recalled a case of an intoxicated patient who arrived foaming at the mouth and choking. There was no doctor to attend to him. “The patient was unconscious. I tried calling the medical officer, but they were honestly too busy to attend to that patient,” Osoro said. It took 30 minutes to find a doctor who could see him and was able to clear the man’s airway. “The patient could have died.”
Sometimes, they do. Osoro recalled that when he was a resident at a teaching hospital in the city of Eldoret, a 7-year-old child arrived with a severe infection in his lungs. “We would have done fine with an ICU bed,” he said, “but we called the ICU department, and all the beds were full.” The child died. “It was really sad explaining to the mom what happened. We told her that if we had an ICU maybe we could have saved (him),” Osoro said. “It was her only kid.”