- The Parliamentary team probing the death of a mother at the Mama Lucy Kibaki has ordered the provision of CCTV footage for the days the lady spent at the facility.
- Senate Health Committee also wants the facility to make plans for a parade identification of the medics who handled the late Maureen Onyango
Image: EZEKIEL AMING'A
The Parliamentary team probing the death of a mother at the Mama Lucy Kibaki has ordered the provision of CCTV footage for the days the lady spent at the facility.
Senate Health Committee also wants the facility to make plans for a parade identification of the medics who handled the late Maureen Onyango.
Maureen died due to excessive bleeding after delivering twins at the hospital operated by the Nairobi government.
The committee chaired by Uasin Gishu senator Jackson Mandago is investigating possible negligence on the part of the medics in the death of the mother.
This was after the lady’s husband, Robert Omondi, accused the nurses and other medical staff who attended to her wife of a sluggish response to help his wife.
On Thursday, they grilled Governor Johnson Sakaja and a team of officers from the Mama Lucy Kibaki hospital as it intensified investigations into the circumstances that led to the death of the lady.
“The hospital should produce the CCTV footage covering the time the patient arrived at the facility to the time she left for Kiambu Level 5 hospital where she was referred to,” Mandago directed.
The committee put the facility’s head of Gynaecology department Gideon Mutiso and the gynaecologist in charge, Lazarus Omondi to task to explain the events that transpired that led to Maureen’s death.
The family had accused the medics of taking more than six hours to take their patient to the theatre despite being referred to the facility in a critical condition.
Dr. Omondi told the committee that the delay in taking the patient to the theatre was due to the patient’s high blood pressure that they needed to contain first.
Omondi said they had to lower the blood pressure to normal levels as she had high levels before any operation could be performed.
He maintained that although the patient waited for at least six hours before the caesarean operation, the wait was necessary and was the best decision to have been taken.
“It is a normal thing to wait for six hours or even more. We could not have conducted any operation on her when her blood pressure was still high,” said Omondi.
In their statement before the committee, Omondi further explained that the emergency caesarean section operation was done at 7 am adding that the procedure was uneventful and the patient was stable after the operation.
The Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital management told the committee that after the operation, the patient remained in the theatre for monitoring.
He said the patient arrived at 10.45 pm on September 5 and then was taken to the theatre at 2 am where she was operated on and delivered at 6 am.
She then remained there for observation until 10 am when she was now stable and could be transferred to the normal wards.
“There is no way the husband saw the patient at 8 am as she was still in the theatre. He must have noticed the bleeding at 1 pm when he visited because that was the visiting time,” he said.
Omondi said that when the nurse noticed the bleeding, she arranged to take the patient back to the theatre for medical observation.
“No nurse can tell a relative to attend to a patient. Those are just allegations.”
He said the patient was referred to Kiambu because there was no ICU space at KNH and Kenyatta University Teaching and Referral Hospital (KUTRH) needed Sh200, 000 for admission.
He said the ambulance left for Kiambu at 11 pm and arrived at 12 midnight, accompanied by an anaesthetist and a nurse, as the patient could not breathe spontaneously.
Omondi held that there was no jam and the driver knows his way around Nairobi and so could not have gotten lost.
Omondi was hard-pressed to explain why the hospital waited until 11 pm yet Kiambu said space was available at 8 am and also went ahead to take more than an hour for a place that takes one hour which is only 22 kilometres away.
Omondi defended themselves, but he said the hours were spent carrying out blood transfusion and putting the patient on the mechanical ventilator.
Governor Johnson Sakaja laid bare the challenges facing the health sector in the city county.
The county boss held the challenges are systemic in nature.
They range from poor staffing, lack of equipment and non-supply of pharmaceuticals, human resource capacity, and financing gaps among others.
“I established a task force to look into the problems bedevilling the sector. Solving the issues will not need a knee-jerk reaction but grounded interventions,” said Sakaja.