Amid doctors’ strike, let’s rid the profession of medical negligence

As the unfortunate doctors’ strike continues to wreak havoc on the public health system, I wish to highlight an aspect of the private health system rarely in the public eye, but which dents Kenya's image as a private healthcare paradise.

Sometimes in February last year, a good friend, a well-known Nairobi lawyer, was struggling with a persistent cough. He was attended by his doctor, a well-established professor of medicine, in one of the top hospitals in Nairobi.

Not only was he misdiagnosed but in the process of taking the tests, the attending doctors punctured his lungs and he was advised to seek urgent treatment in the UK. When he landed in the UK hospital, the doctors were flabbergasted by Nairobi’s negligence and declared the expensive Nairobi tests useless.

Unfortunately my friend passed on, leaving us wondering if the wrong treatment hastened his journey to the grave. Patient two, a man in his seventies, went for treatment for an arterial bold clot in a similarly high-level hospital in Nairobi last month.

Due to wrong management, again by one of Kenya’s renowned professors, this gentleman is now required to have his leg amputated. Patient three went for fairly routine management of his kidneys and during the course of treatment his entire bowel system was messed up. Patient four, another friend, has just been informed by doctors in India that he has cancer after several months of wrong diagnosis in a top Nairobi hospital.

I cite these examples of medical care in top-level hospitals by top-level professionals to illustrate a dark reality. While it has long been known that medical care on the other side of Outer Ring Road is deplorable, the reality is that for most Kenyans, their economic status notwithstanding, seeking medical care in Kenya is a frightful experience. I am aware that we have excellent professionals in the sector who truly abide by the dictates of their profession and the Hippocratic Oath.

Unfortunately for them, the hordes of reckless doctors, whose greater focus is the hefty bill they will send out at the end of the process is increasingly the brand of the Kenyan medical profession. When did the rain start beating us?

Granted, the collapse of professionalism is not unique to the medical profession. People no longer accept lawyers’ professional undertakings. Buildings overseen by engineers collapse every other day. But while other professionals have improved their internal disciplinary mechanisms, doctors, particularly the senior ones, remain largely secure from any serious sanction.

Their disciplinary body is doctor-heavy and overwhelmed. If one chooses to go the court route to enforce a claim for negligence, further hurdles abound. To succeed in a medical negligence claim, you need the evidence of a fellow doctor. Few doctors will risk the shunning that follows such action. To make matters worse, most top-level hospitals give senior doctors a carte blanche to manage their patients as they wish as long as the presence of the said doctors keeps the patient numbers coming in. This sorry state of medical care explains why the traffic to Indian hospitals has exploded in the last few years.

What then is to be done?

While the systemic problem in professions requires a long-term global solution, there are things that can be done to minimise the disasters occurring in our hospitals. The disciplinary mechanisms have to be more patient friendly and more transparent.

KMPD Board chair Prof George Magoha must bring the zeal he brought to the education sector to clean up the medical profession. Doctors must be willing to stand up against their colleagues defiling the profession otherwise it will collapse for all of them.

The DPP must prosecute a few cases for criminal negligence to send the message about the value of life. Unless we arrest the calamity currently occurring in both the public and private health care scene, the cost to this nation will be incalculable.

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