Better healthcare is what Kenyans want.
When you go to the hospital or clinic, you’re likely to wait less and see more personnel.
Most of these graduated from the Kenya Medical Training College with quasi-medical qualifications such as diplomas and certificates in biomedical engineering and record keeping.
While they are not medics, they will still seek jobs in health facilities.
They join a sluggishly growing job market.
KMTC graduated 22,695 students on December 7 last year, followed by the University of Nairobi.
The two are Kenya’s biggest training grounds for medical and related programmes in Kenya.
The medical college also graduated thousands of diplomas and certificates in nutrition and community health.
According to the government, many of them could find jobs to drive primary healthcare, the pillar of Universal Health Coverage.
“It is a major boost to the transformative Afya Nyumbani, which President William Ruto launched in October under the Universal Health Coverage. We underscore the crucial role of primary healthcare workers, acting as the initial line of defense for our citizens,” Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua said at the graduation.
“Through strategic investments and comprehensive training, the government aims to strengthen these frontline workers, ensuring every Kenyan, regardless of location, receives the essential primary healthcare services they deserve.”
The graduation, the biggest ever for KMTC, saw a total of 870 graduates awarded with higher diplomas, 12,917 received diplomas and 8,908 got certificates.
Gachagua said some of the recent graduates could get jobs in the United Kingdom and Germany under health partnership agreements with the two countries.
“Kenyan medics are among the most sought-after healthcare providers in the world due to their strong work ethics. At the moment we have requests from the UK and Germany to provide them with healthcare providers,” he said.
Kenya also added nearly 1,200 doctors, pharmacists and dentists into the job market last year, most of them coming from the University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Moi University and the Mt Kenya University.
UoN on December 15 graduated 260 students with Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery Degree. Another 84 graduated with a pharmacy degree and 40 in dentistry.
Health Cabinet Secretary Susan Nakhumicha said most Kenyan doctors find jobs in the private sector, rather than in government.
She said 62 per cent of the country’s 14, 829 doctors are employed in the private sector and only 3, 930 are in the public sector payroll.
“Our greatest challenge includes maldistribution of doctors with 62 per cent being employed in the private sector and 38 per cent in the public where the majority are in major urban areas,” Nakhumicha said in a recent report to the Senate Health committee.
She said specialists are largely found in bigger hospitals where certain facilities exist.
“The ministry together with the Council of Governors and other agencies are working on a framework to optimise their training and utilisation of medical specialists equitably,” Nakhumicha said.
The CS said the density of doctors, nurses and clinical officers per 10,000 population in Kenya doubled by 108 per cent from 14.47 per cent in 2006 to 30.14 per cent in 2021.
“Cumulatively, big progress made Kenya among the leading countries in the region but still has a 32 per cent gap to achieve the 4.45 per 1000 Sustainable Development Goal threshold index,” she said.
Nakhumicha said the density of Kenyan doctors is 2.56 per cent per 10,000 population.
Kenya has 12 medical schools that produce an average of 1,200 doctors annually, she said.
In 2021, the Ministry of Health undertook a Health Labour Market Analysis to generate evidence on the relationship between supply, demand and need of the health labour force in Kenya.
The analysis was to also help develop policy actions to address the existing gaps.
It indicates that the number of graduates from the medicine and surgery programme increased by 96 per cent between 2016 and 2019 from 320 to 628 graduates.
The number of graduates from the pharmacy programme increased by 84 per cent from 209 in 2016 to 379 graduates in 2018, before declining to 259 in 2019 (a decline of 31.7 per cent from the 2018 level).
For the nursing programmes, the number of graduates declined consistently by 21 per cent from 1140 in 2016 to 900 in 2019.
The biggest decline was, however, recorded by the medical laboratory sciences programme.
The number of graduates in the programme was 588 in 2016 down to 288 in 2019, representing a 49 per cent decline.
Officials of the ministries of Labour and Health, the World Health Organisation and other institutions also analysed the mix of Kenya’s health system.
The analysis, published by the BMJ Global Health journal, showed Kenya had a total of 189,932 health workers across 13 major health occupations in 2020 across both public and private sectors.
Of this stock, about 13, 000 were doctors (including 7,884 medical officers and 4,908 specialists), 110,000 nurses, 25,000 clinical officers, 1,344 dentists and 987 dental technologists.
Others included 1,337 pharmacists, 6,240 pharmaceutical technologists and 1,757 physiotherapists, among others.
