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Experts blame poor leadership for declining health care in Kenya

NAIROBI, KENYA: Poor leadership in public hospitals and inexperienced workers are major cause for declining quality of medical care, according to the Kenya Medical Research Institute.

The 2015 Economic Survey released last week said the quality of health care in public hospitals is on the decline causing more deaths in 2014 than in any of the previous five years.

A news report published last Tuesday jointly carried out by Kemri, the University of Oxford, UK, University of Amsterdam and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, arrives at a similar verdict.

The survey covered 22 Level 4 and 5 hospitals spread in all counties, which are mainly referral and internship training institutions.

The facilities are responsible for the practical training of the country's future doctors but were largely found to ignore simple treatment protocols that are clearly spelt out in government policy.

For example, although it is government policy that all children admitted into public hospitals be tested for HIV this is not happening even where the testing kits are in stock.

Only 12 out of every 100 infants are being tested for HIV and it was not being done at all in five of these high end public hospitals.

For this, the research published in the journal Implementation Science, blames the hospitals' administration for poor supervision. The quality supervisory role rests with the national and country governments.

"Evidence suggest that supervision and commitment of the hospital leadership to enforce such policies are important in adoption since testing kits are rarely missing in hospitals and were available at the time of study," wrote the authors.

In 2012 Kenya adopted a global strategy which targeted at elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission and one of the requirements is to have all infants tested for the virus.

The team led by Dr David Gathara of Kemri was also surprised at the high variation of the quality of care between the various hospitals despite all supposed to follow a similar treatment policy.

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