Persons in controversial medical equipment belong to jail - Atellah

The Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists and Dentists’ Union secretary general Davji Atellah now wants action taken against those behind the Managed Equipment Service project.

This comes barely days after Health CS Susan Wafula announced that the contracts for the projects will end in July.

Wafula said vendors of the leased medical equipment have until July 31 to ensure a seamless rollover of health services.

Speaking on Citizen TV on Monday, Atellah said the project was implemented without putting into consideration the needs of Kenyans.

“Medical equipment was a scandal, it was a criminal network, in fact, those people who were involved in this actually belong to jail,” he said.

Atellah said existing reports have exposed how the procedures and laws of procurement were not followed, with some of the equipment lying unutilized due to factors which were not put into consideration before the project was implemented.

“An ICU that was meant to be in Meru is still in the Netherlands, in some counties they had a theatre which was not operationalized for two years, in another there was an MRI which was not utilized for all the period,” he said.

“It was actually a scandal; it was a time bomb that I think if we are serious government we would have put people to book over this.”

The decision to terminate the contracts was arrived at after a review done by the Ministry of Health across various counties found inadequacies in the equipment.

“We found out that some equipment has not been installed to this day, some have not been serviced in a long time and some are not even available,” the CS said.

“We have told them that we cannot continue the same way because we need value for money.” 

The CS said the shortage of personnel to operate the equipment also remains a challenge with reports showing that the equipment in some counties remains unutilised.

The development comes even as the Senate called for a fresh audit into the status of the project.

The Senate wants the Health Committee in a statement to the House to detail the terms of the contracts the government signed on behalf of counties, stating the amount that was agreed on and the amount paid since inception of the project.