• Private hospital was closed and its top management arrested following the death of a journalist's baby
• Regulatory agency satisfied that management has rectified areas of concern
Image: Courtesy
The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board on Tuesday announced the re-opening of Shalom Community Hospital in Machakos.
The hospital was closed indefinitely on May 5 following the death of a baby who was overdosed. The unqualified worker who administered the injection and the hospital's management were arrested.
The board said the private health facility’s management had complied with all recommendations it had made after the hospital's closure.
KMPDB gave the facility a clean bill of health during a joint presser with the Nursing Council of Kenya, Pharmacy and Poisons Board and Machakos county government representatives at the hospital on Tuesday.
“We had earlier inspected the facility before its temporary closure and requested them to do certain things,” KMPD chairperson Eva Njenga said.
Njenga said they were impressed that the hospital’s management had rectified all areas of concern.
“They have given us satisfactory answers and where they need to consult specialists, they are already negotiating with them. The hospital is clean, issues of human resource, pharmacy and dangerous drugs among others have been fixed.”
She added, “We have agreed that the hospital should resume functioning and we will give them their operations license back."
Njenga said though the facility had been cleared and allowed to resume its operations, the inspections will be a continuous process to ensure quality health care service provision is adhered to.
“The work of the board is to ensure patients get quality health care at the right time, place and in the right way,” she added.
She said KMPD has the mandate to inspect all hospitals, private and public, across the country.
Machakos and Kitui Level 5 hospitals are next, Njenga said.
She said similar inspections were ongoing at Kenyatta National Hospital.
The chairperson revealed that the regulatory agency had been given 90 days to conduct inspections in all public and private health facilities.
They directed the hospital’s management to provide a weekly progress report for the next six months.
The idea is for all health facilities playing a big role in delivering Universal Health Coverage to be efficient in quality health service provision, Njenga said.
“In Machakos, 50 per cent of health care is delivered by private hospitals. We will support them as regulatory bodies and we want to partner in all these," she said.
Announcing closure of Shalom, Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua said his government revoked the hospital's business permit while Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board revoked its operational license.
He ordered the hospital’s managing director George Onyango’s immediate arrest alongside some of his staff.
Mutua had visited the hospital accompanied by officials from the Ministry of Health, NCK, Clinical Officers Council, PPB and KMPDB.
The group toured the facility to investigate the death of KBC correspondent Jonathan Mutiso’s son that Sunday.
“Investigations have established that Shalom Hospital has myriad process failures, lacks proper procedures and staffing. The death of the infant could have been prevented but clinical officer and pharmacist gave the wrong dosage of a drug to be administered - 20 times more than expected," Mutua said.
He said the person who administered the injection was not a trained health worker but a hospital attendant.
(Edited by R.Wamochie)