Governor Moses Akaranga given 2 weeks to sort mess at hospital

Governor Moses Akaranga takes rounds in the male ward at Vihiga Hospital after he made an impromptu visit to the facilit. [PHOTO: ERIC LUNGAI/STANDARD]

Medical officers have threatened to shut down Vihiga Referral Hospital for non-compliance with health standards.

They issued a two-week notice to the county government to fix the problems.

A letter addressed to Governor Moses Akaranga from medical superintendent Godfrey Koba’s office, and signed by 28 medical practitioners, pointed out that six key departments in the hospital have been found non-compliant to health standards.

The theatre, laundry, laboratory, x-ray, pharmacy and referral units were listed as some of the departments in deplorable conditions.

“Kindly note that we have been reduced to mere spectators especially regarding planning and decision making for health service delivery in this county,” a section of the letter reads.

Last year in November, a report of a special committee investigating the status of health  revealed massive deficiencies in health sector in all departments and recommended for a complete overhaul of the whole system.

The report recommended quick resolutions among them affording health facilities financial autonomy to enable them budget appropriately and avert a crisis in the sector.

Whereas the budgetary allocation for health was Sh889 million, the committee noted that a bulk of it was spent on recurrent expenditure with Sh560 million going to salaries. Sh160 million went into meeting other expenses.

The report prompted Akaranga to make an impromptu visit to the facility where he admitted the hospital was on its death bed and promised to revamp the health sector.

In the letter, health workers point out that they have had to improvise in trying to alleviate patients’ suffering. It said such efforts significantly compromise quality of care and are therefore clinically unacceptable.

They observed that patients have lost confidence in healthcare providers as they are forced to seek key services which would have otherwise been offered at the hospital, from private providers. They said in view of the hospital’s poor state and impending collapse of service delivery and seeming lack of commitment by county government to intervene despite frequent reminders, they are heavily aggrieved.

“We remind the governor to move in with speed,” the letter read.