Do we need to import doctors from Cuba? No, I don’t think so

The government of Kenya has announced that they’ll bring in foreign doctors from Cuba “to build capacity” in counties in specialist services. While it’s their constitutional mandate to build capacity in counties, the benefits remain blurry and contentious as the populace, including the health workers who are stakeholders in the sector, do not understand.

Health workers have no problem with importing skills “for greater enjoyment of the right to highest attainable standards of health” as provided for in Article 43(1)(a) of our Constitution but then those skills must be unavailable in the country and the government should have exhibited sincere efforts to ensure the skills are present.

Misplaced priorities?

In a country where we have over 7,000 Clinical Officers, 25,000 nurses and more than 1,000 doctors unemployed after expensive and rigorous training, the government must ensure proper stakeholders’ consultations if there is to be cooperation at the work place.

The question of how much they will be paid and why not employ already qualified health workers who are readily available in the country is one that must be addressed candidly and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.

In my opinion and that of many health workers that I have interacted with, the type of health workforce Kenya should import are lecturers in the specialist fields not currently available locally with enough resources in terms of necessary equipment to ensure proper learning that imparts competence and reduce the number of patients who have to travel to India and other foreign nations for unavailable specialised services.

If the specialists will be coming to render day-to-day services in the otherwise ill-equipped county hospitals of which most remain in deplorable conditions despite health workers’ industrial unrest to have them improved, then the foreign doctors might surrender to frustrations and exit before the system brands them failures.

The problem with us is that we have problems appreciating our own. We produce competent expertise who when engaged by other countries or organizations are highly regarded and feted for their exemplary service and competence, but back at home we treat them with indifference and sometimes contempt.

Can’t reward our own

A good example would be in 2015 when the Kenyan government sent a group of 170 health workers to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the Africa Support for Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (ASEOWA) who gained enormous knowledge and skills - only 2,000 health workers across the world boast of - in dealing with contagious/hemorrhagic diseases both in prevention and outbreak management.

Aware that contagious and hemorrhagic diseases are on the rise in the country and on the continent, the health workers presented a proposal that would have seen the government enroll them into a special emergency response team at the national level to deal with conditions like cholera, dengue and chikungunya among others and help build capacity in the counties.

This proposal remains on the shelves of Afya House even after President Uhuru Kenyatta publicly declared support for it.

Highly trained but no jobs

Some of these health workers remain unemployed to date while cholera outbreaks kill Kenyans including the current outbreak in Turkana County where more than 20 lives are reported to have been lost so far.

I will not be surprised if the government talks of importing ‘experts’ to advise on how to prevent and manage these outbreaks while its own experts remain frustrated and unutilized, or underutilised.

Kenya has become a country that can only be likened to the story of the poor man on a mountaintop who lived lamenting to God without knowing that the stone-filled land he complained was barren was actually the breakthrough he always prayed for because it contained precious rocks and building stones which would change his fortunes if explored.

Mr Wachira HSC, (National Chairman Kenya Union of Clinical Officers, Former Team Leader Ebola Volunteers)