Health budget cut kills hope of pay rise for striking doctors

Striking doctors protest outside Afya House in Nairobi. The Health ministry has slashed its budget for employee compensation by Sh286 million. [Photo: File/Standard]

There may be no money for striking doctors in the current financial year after revised budget estimates by Treasury cut the allocation meant to pay workers.

National Treasury’s revised estimates show only Sh184 million has been added to the Ministry of Health even as allocation for compensation to employees was slashed by Sh286 million.

In estimates that have scaled down on a number of health projects, the ministry’s supplementary estimates have increased marginally to Sh60.45 billion, an increase of Sh184 million.

The Government has, however, cut down on the amount to be used to pay employees. Unlike in the previous estimates where Sh5.72 billion had been approved, National Treasury has cut that to Sh5.43 billion.

Human resource was the biggest casualty, with the Government making a U-turn on an earlier decision to approve Sh3.57 billion. Treasury is proposing to cut that to Sh2.74 billion, a reduction of Sh828.1 million.

General administration, planning and support services has seen its budget on employee compensation trimmed by Sh761.6 billion when compared to previous estimates. However, a few departments in the Health Ministry have been awarded modest increments on employee compensation costs.

They include communicable disease control (Sh87 million), national referral and specialised services (Sh360.4 million) and forensic and diagnostics (Sh57 million).

In revised estimates that break down all the programmes the State wants to undertake in 2016/17 financial year, only the maternity programme has been allocated more money. From a previous approval of Sh4.3 billion, it has been added Sh1.5 billion, pushing the allocation to Sh5.8 billion. General administration, planning and support services saw a reduction of Sh4.84 billion, making it the biggest cut. It will now get Sh10.58 billion instead of Sh15.42 billion.

The immunisation programme will have to do without Sh1.6 billion after its budget was cut by 48 per cent to Sh1.72 billion.

Expenditure on family planning services has also been revised downwards by Sh110 million. In the process, the number of HIV positive patients receiving one viral load test per year has been revised from the previous target of 12 million to just 1.2 million.

At the same time, the number of ACT doses, a drug that treats malaria, has been cut from 88,355 to 75,000. Even for health workers, only 300 will be monitored for radiation exposure, down from 400.