•This comes in the wake of the ministry having invested a lot of funding in acquiring expensive medical equipment, through the Managed Equipment Scheme
•The fear is that some should unqualified personnel find their way into hospitals to run or manage the equipment which might end up as a health hazard.
Image: MAGDALINE SAYA
The government now plans to reintroduce a Bill in Parliament to regulate medical engineering in the country.
This is after it emerged that many quacks have populated the profession and are taking advantage of the lack of regulation to practice.
The first attempt to regulate the profession flopped after a bill introduced into parliament failed to see the light of day.
According to the Health CAS Dr Rashid Aman, the bill did not go beyond the second reading.
Currently, there are about 10,000 biomedical engineers who have graduated in the country with about 2,000 being women.
This comes in the wake of the government having invested a lot of funding in acquiring expensive medical equipment, through the Managed Equipment Service.
The fear is that should unqualified personnel find their way into hospitals to run or manage the equipment it might end up as a health hazard.
The MES arrangement ensures that public hospitals have access to modern health infrastructure, equipment and/or services over an agreed period, with the government making regular, pre-arranged payments based on agreed performance parameters.
The programme entails leasing assorted medical gadgets to select national and county government hospitals for seven years ending 2022.
The renal, laboratory, ICU radiology and theatre equipment were leased to at least two level 4 hospitals in each of the 47 counties.
Association of Medical Engineers of Kenya SG Millicent Aloo now says fast-tracking the regulation of biomedical engineering as a profession will bring sanity to the profession and allow only people who are qualified to run the medical equipment management.
“When you lack a regulatory body anybody can come in and practice whatever it is that they don’t know. Right now the government has invested heavily in MES project and many sophisticated equipment are in the different hospitals,” Aloo said.
“Without regulation, you will find that even people who are not biomedical engineers will go there to start touching the equipment and very soon all those equipment will be down because they are being touched by people who are not qualified,” she added.
Aman has acknowledged that biomedical engineers play a major role in the country’s health system.
He said they are key people specialized in making sure that the different medical equipment used within health facilities are well maintained and are kept running to provide the needed services to patients.
“The ministry is aware that the biomedical engineering field is not regulated and that we have a bill that was taken to parliament some years back but was stich in parliament after the second reading,” Aman said.
“We have just installed very many oxygen plants across the country in different institutions in response to Covid-19 and with these kinds of equipment, this cadre of engineers is very important because they are on the ground, they are in the facilities, they are the ones responsible for maintaining these equipment for routine services.”
All graduates of medical engineering were regularly deployed to work in Hospital Maintenance Units (HMU’s) in public hospitals all over the country until 1995 due to change in government policy.
The number of medical engineering personnel being absorbed into public service has drastically reduced and the employments spread far apart.
A number of these graduates find work in private hospitals, Kenya Armed Forces, Medical equipment supplies companies, the hotel industry among others.