Over the past five months, the country has been rocked by a chilling pattern of unexplained deaths occurring within hospital walls. Facilities that should be sanctuaries of healing have now become scenes of horror.
In what experts are now calling a systemic failure of security and governance, three confirmed murders have occurred inside hospitals, with two at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) and the latest at Chiromo Group of Hospitals, Braeside branch.
All victims were admitted patients, all died violently, and all under institutional care.
In February and again in July, patients admitted at KNH had their throats slit in the dead of night, both in Ward 7B.
This week, Dr Susan Kamengere, a 48-year-old mother of three, died at Braeside in circumstances now confirmed by a postmortem to be manual strangulation.
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“Hospitals should be the safest places anyone should want to go to for care. Now that we have had these incidences, it means there is a security breach in some of these facilities,” said Kahuria Mundia, the deputy national chairperson of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) and a healthcare governance expert.
Dr Mundia pointed out that these disturbing deaths signal lapses in hospital security frameworks.
“We probably don’t have enough security officers, or we don’t have ways of checking who goes in and out. Some of these attackers could be fellow patients or people impersonating staff. We must address this urgently,” he said. But what security guarantees should patients expect when admitted to a hospital?
Emily Omari, a quality and patient safety specialist, says identity and access control is a crucial first step in ensuring safety.
“Every hospital staff, from the CEO to the security guard, must wear an identification badge with their name, title, and staff number. If someone is attending to a patient and they have no visible ID, that is a red flag. Any facility that overlooks this opens itself to danger,” she said.
Omari stated that this protocol is not optional.
“Anybody can dress up in a uniform and claim to be a staff member. Without identifiers, they can walk into a ward, do harm, and vanish without trace,” said Omari.
The case of the two KNH murders is even more unsettling, given that the prime suspect, Kennedy Kalombotole, was a known figure within the hospital. He had been previously admitted to ICU, later discharged and taken to a home, then again readmitted at the facility, and stayed around the hospital for up to three years.
Dr Mundia acknowledged that while the health system is designed to be compassionate, even to patients with psychological issues or nowhere else to go, this can be exploited.
“Some patients fake illness. Some doctors might discharge them, only for them to claim relapse and come back. It becomes very difficult to screen such individuals out, especially in a system that leans on compassion,” he said.
In the Chiromo incident where Susan died of strangulation, questions abound. According to Dr Mundia, Chiromo’s Kileleshwa branch has CCTV in each room. It is not clear whether the same is the case at the Braeside where Susan was admitted and died later.
“That a single incident happens in one of the branches that probably does not have the same standards that are in the other establishments is a little bit off. So it could have been a premeditated activity from long time, you never know. Or someone just probably come into the hospital masquerading as a clinician for such an incident to happen,” said Dr Mundia.
According to Omari, patient safety goes beyond security guards and identification tags. It is an entire framework.
“Safety includes the physical infrastructure, the doors, the CCTV systems, the oxygen supply, the fire preparedness. If there is a fire today, we would lose newborns, mothers in labour, and patients on machines. How many facilities have tested their evacuation plans?” she said.
She also expressed concern over overlooked hazards such as poor waste disposal, blocked oxygen plants, and inadequate surveillance.
“You don’t see these issues in reports, but those of us in hospitals deal with patient errors and system failures every day. If we don’t strengthen these internal systems, more deaths will happen, and many will go unreported,” Omari said.
Dr Mundia called for urgent reforms, noting that after the first incident at KNH, systems should have been tightened.
“CCTV feeds should be live and reviewed regularly. We need panic buttons for patients and ensure that nurses make consistent rounds. And maybe we should even adopt banking-style alarms where patients can call for help,” Mundia said.