• The strike has forced patients at KTRH to seek help from private and mission hospitals.
• Morebu said the strike will continue until the county administration pays their dues.
Image: /FILE
Doctors in Kisii on Wednesday went on strike, citing delayed pay.
Kenya Medical Pharmacists and Doctors Union officials said the 170 doctors have not been paid since May this year.
The strike has forced patients at the Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital (KTRH) to seek help from private and mission hospitals.
Milka Onsombi said she was turned away at KTRH on Wednesday night for lack of a doctor to attend to her. “We were told to go to other hospitals instead of idling at the waiting bay not knowing when the doctors would resume operations,” she told the Star outside Christamarriane Catholic Mission Hospital.
KMPDU Kisii branch secretary Peter Morebu said the strike will continue until the county administration pays their dues.
“We cannot work on empty stomachs,” he said.
Morebu said efforts to broker a deal with the county failed.
“It appears there’s nobody who wants to listen to us and going on strike is our last resort on this matter,” he told the Star on the phone.
Besides demanding salaries, Morebu said, doctors at KTRH are pressing for better working conditions in the wake of Covid-19.
Kisii has registered 13 Covid-19 cases so far.
One patient, a referral case from Rachuonyo in Homa Bay, is on a ventilator at the facility.
Morebu said standards at the hospital need to be improved to protect health workers. “What is going on there is absurd and may exacerbate an already fragile situation,” he said.
The union of nurses' Kisii branch secretary Eric Rioba said they are set to join the strike any time from tomorrow if the county fails to pay them.
“We are in a similar, if not worse, predicament as doctors, and we may follow suit soon,” he said.
Rioba said they are planning a meeting to deliberate when the work boycott begins.
“I have already reached out to other union officials to reach an agreement on when we will stop working,” he said.
Meanwhile, Governor James Ongwae said they are mulling using the new doctor’s residence wing at KTRH as an isolation centre for health officers who may contract the virus.
He said his administration continues to improve its readiness for possible mass infections.
Ongwae further asked the national government to establish a testing centre in the region, citing Kisii as a major transit and economic hub in the western region and a possible hotbed of more viral infections.
Edited by A.N