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NAIROBI: Kenya may be producing half-baked doctors, a new report has revealed.
The report by the Ministry of Health, Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and the University of Oxford, UK, exposes chilling experiences for surgery patients in the former provincial and district hospitals.
The study, which covered 22 Level Four and Five hospitals offering internship for new doctors revealed that surgery patients share beds, lack water or soap for hand washing, lack basic medicines and in many cases simple treatment procedures are ignored.
Published on October 28 in the journal Tropical Medicine & International Health, the study says the quality of surgery in public hospitals is unacceptable and a sorry training ground for new doctors.
Such centres provide supervised training to graduate clinical staff during a one-year compulsory internship period prior to full registration. The team says although these hospitals had well qualified surgeons on duty, the quality of care given to patients and consequently training for the interns is seriously deficient.
SURGICAL PROBLEMS
“It is therefore of concern that basic resources including running water, soap and first-line drugs were not always available and that surgical patients had to share beds,” says the study. In a quarter of the hospitals, some of them Level Five, the team found that they did not have gloves in theatres.
In six hospitals, the team found discarded sharp objects such as needles and blades overflowing from containers. In only three out of the 22 hospitals did the team find national clinical guidelines for handling common surgical problems. Only 10 hospitals had clean toilets.
Only a few hospitals had oxygen and oxygen administration equipment despite all of them being referral institutions.
DECAYED INFRASTRUCTURE
Responding to the threat of decayed health infrastructure, the Ministry of Health has floated a Sh34 billion tender for the supply of medical equipment.
Health Cabinet Secretary James Macharia said the equipment upgrade project will be fast-tracked to improve the quality of healthcare.
Interested parties are expected to supply, install, test, train users, replace and maintain the medical equipment on a long-term basis of between seven and 10 years.
Some of the equipment to be supplied include those for diagnosing and treating kidney diseases, advanced theatre technologies and radiology machines.
About 30 per cent of hospitals sampled did not receive the correct antibiotics care. The researchers found very poor tradition of keeping records. Only half of the hospitals have records showing the name of the person who administered anaesthesia or the type of drug used.
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