Fever-pitch campaigns drown nurses’ plight

Government appears to be using the current fever-pitch political campaigns to ignore the strike by nurses perhaps in the vain hope that it will die off.

It has not although the gallant profession has found it difficult to compete for media space with politicians on television and radio.

In the process, many patients continue to suffer in public hospitals since nurses actually deal with most of the ailments that do not need the intervention of a clinical officer of doctor.

But there is another unseen side to the nurses saga that has a deep and negative effect on the quality of service in public hospitals. Many of the most experienced nurses are leaving the country to work abroad.

A majority are underpaid, undervalued and overworked and they are finding it better to go abroad to ply their trade, where their earnings are better than what they are paid by the State, and they can even save enough to go back to school.

In high demand

This brain drain is creating a skills gap that not even the medical training colleges can fill quickly enough, and the effect will eventually be felt.

According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 20,000 nurses leave Africa every year for better pay in the West. Kenya is estimated to have lost thousands of nurses as the demand for their services abroad increases. In 2006, it was estimated that Britain alone would need up to 250,000 more nurses by 2008, and it is unlikely the demand has slowed. As the nurse-patient ration dwindles in public hospitals, more people are dying because they cannot access first-line health care on time.

The brain drain also includes students who opt to study nursing abroad, but never come back to work in Kenya because of the poor pay.

In Kenya nurses are trained for four years followed by one year of internship.  The full cost of training one nurse averages $30,000 or Sh2.6 million but the brain drain is slowly taking away much of this key talent.