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By Dann Okoth
NAIROBI; KENYA: Nurses have threatened to call countrywide demonstrations to protest the handling of the recent rape saga at the Kenyatta National Hospital.
Led by Jared Konam, Kenyatta National Hospital’s (KNH) Works Committee chairman, the nurses said the events following the alleged rape incident exposed their soft-underbelly as a vulnerable group both at workplace and in society.
“We are particularly angry with the Member of Parliament who mobilised women to stage demonstrations at KNH, targeting and portraying nurses as rapists,” said an angry Konam, who is also chairman of the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotel, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and allied Workers (Kudhehia), Nairobi County.
Nominated MP Rachel Shebesh led a group of women activists in a demonstration at KNH to protest an alleged rape of a patient admitted at the hospital by a male nurse.
The nurses construed the move as an affront to their profession and characters, especially after some demonstrators hurled abuse at male nurses.
“Their body language and words all but suggested we are all rapists and social misfits,” he says. “We will call on our members to demonstrate and protest this.”
His colleague Obuya Obengo, head of Medical Chapter at KHN threatened legal action against the people who have wrongly accused the nurses.
“These actions are an affront to our profession,” he says. “We are even considering legal action especially against the MP.”
During the protest, the nurses will demand that their conditions of work be improved, including proper security at the workplace and adhering to international standards of their operations.
According to World Health Organisation (WHO) there should be one nurse per six patients, but in Kenya one nurse is in charge of 60 patients or more. This understaffing, they say, makes crime and accusations of crime more likely.
“In a place like Kenyatta one nurse is responsible for a whole ward at night which could contain 100 patients or more,” claimed Jophinus Musundi, Chairman of Kenya National Union of Nurses (KNUN).
He says despite the workload the working environment is not conducive making the nurses vulnerable to injury and other occupational hazards.
Musundi says standard practice is to have a nurse accompanied by a colleague while attending to a patient in order to eliminate or limit an error in any procedure.
“The fact that some hospitals leave a whole ward to one nurse is a gross violence of standards of practice and we demand this must change,” he says.
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