One in five women giving birth in public hospitals is humiliated, abused and asked for a bribe by health workers.
A survey carried out by among others the Division of Reproductive Health at the Ministry of Health shows that 20 per cent of mothers delivering in public hospitals are either indecently poked, beaten, insulted, neglected or pinched on the thighs.
The report published three weeks ago (April 17) in the journal Plus One, paints delivery rooms more like torture chambers where anything goes including forced caesarean sections and tubal-ligations than joyful places to create new lives.
The team, which included the Federation of Women Lawyers, the National Nurses Association and the Population Council, surveyed 641 mothers who had just given birth in a nationally representative sample of 13 health facilities. The 13 surveyed facilities were in Kisumu, Kiambu, Nyandarua and Uasin Gishu, along with one maternity hospital in Nairobi.
The team, which was led by Dr Timothy Abuya of Population Council revealed that it is common knowledge that delivering women are routinely abused in local hospitals but this is the first time the magnitude of the problem has been documented.
The humiliation and abuses are worse for first time mothers aged below 19 and single mothers.
The litany of health workers abusing delivering women was first documented in the Kenya Service Provision Assessment 2010 where women described the cruelty being meted to them by doctors.
Requisite hours
"The women described doctors treating patients rudely, abusing them, ignoring them, drunk at work, or failing to fulfill their requisite hours of service," the report showed.
Following the 2010 revelation, the Ministry of Health put in place some intervention measures to reduce the humiliation of mothers.
"Our yearlong study was to try to capture abusive treatment of delivering women before and after the interventions," says the new study which indicates nothing has changed.
The Ministry of Health HRH Strategy 2014-2018 indicates this could get worse with devolution which has triggered dissatisfaction among health workers and high migration of nurses and doctors from the public sector to the private sector.
In October 2013, the Government launched a Patients’ Rights Charter which is supposed to protect patients against abuse. However, medical experts say there has been no effort to enforce the charter or educate Kenyans on what to do if their rights have been violated.
Women aged 19 or below were at a higher risk of abuse while women with four to nine other children were more likely to be neglected. Health workers attitude towards these older women, the researchers say, was that they were experience and did not need help.
Women with more births, the team says, were three times more likely to be detained for lacking money for payment, and five times more likely to be requested for a bribe compared to those making first delivery. The biggest abuse reported by women was being given non-confidential care and being subjected to some treatments such as caesarean section without consent.