President William Ruto has pledged to ensure 100,000 community health workers (CHWs) and 4,000 doctors are hired to enable Kenyans easily access healthcare.
The President on Tuesday met with officials from the doctors’ union at State House to discuss the Kenya Kwanza health agenda.
They were led by the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists’ Union SG Davji Atellah.
“It was also agreed that a hub and spoke model would be applied where these CHWs would be organised in a 25-member cohort each reporting to a medical doctor,” Atellah said.
This, he said, will culminate in the employment of all the 4,000 jobless doctors.
The issue of UHC staff also dominated the agenda with the medics calling on the President to intervene and ensure that the more than 8,550 staff that had been hired under the programme are hired on permanent and pensionable terms.
According to Atellah, it was agreed that there will be further consultations on how to initiate the process of forming the Health Service Commission(HSC) as has been demanded by the unions as a way of ending the challenges such as industrial disharmony that have been affecting the health sector.
The unions have argued that the formation of the commission is the only guarantee for the achievement of the desired reforms and harmony in the health sector.
They have further argued that despite Kenyans expecting improved and seamless service delivery under the devolved system of governance, the public health sector has been marred with constitutional industrial unrest occasioned by the lack of a coordinated approach to the management of human resources for health.
“As a Union, we fully support this idea because we believe that Kenyans deserve to get uninterrupted services free from mismanagement by the county governments,” Atellah said.
The President also reiterated his desire to have a publicly funded Universal healthcare programme, which would ensure there is increased access to quality healthcare without anyone suffering financial loss.
Atellah termed this as a move in the right direction to ensuring that healthcare becomes a basic and fundamental human right as per the Constitution.
