The arrival of the Cuban doctors has been received with various reactions all over the country and some people are whispering that now they will be treated by wazungus. Talk of neocolonialism at its best! Some Kenyans will be flocking to hospitals to witness first-hand Ricardo and Alejandro listening to their heartbeats using the same Littman stethoscope.
This is tantamount to putting your baby out in the cold in preference to another woman’s child. What then is the hullabaloo all about? Wananchi claim that Kenyan doctors are never at their workstations. Instead, they work in their private clinics, dispensing drugs stolen from the Government. They are also prone to medical errors such as performing brain surgery on the wrong patient.
The Government claims that Kenyan doctors are a restless, lazy lot that wants to be paid astronomical salaries for less work and thus needs to be reined in. Kenyan doctors say health is severely underfunded and that there are insufficient drugs, equipment and health workers.
Whichever side of this argument you support, this is my analysis: Cuba allocates 27 per cent of its budget to health. Kenya allocates less than 10 per cent. Currently, we have 2,000 unemployed doctorsand specialists who understand local diseases and were trained by taxpayers' money at a cost of Sh1,000,000 a year.
Why not employ them before looking elsewhere? For someone who is employed to save your life, you pay Sh150,000 while a politician who exudes verbal fumes gets paid Sh1,000,000. Was the process of hiring Cuban doctors consultative? How exactly does it contribute to the improvement and strengthening of health systems in Kenya and by extension the Big Four agenda?
With the huge salaries, security, accommodation, interpreters and transport costs dangled to get the Cubans here, wouldn’t it have been more sustainable to employ the jobless Kenyan doctors? The medicine we are practising is predominantly tropical, ably guided by our national guidelines. How can Cuban doctors adjust to all this within two years without litigation and malpractice cases skyrocketing?
This is a time bomb. Somebody is playing around with the health of Kenyans by offering myopic solutions calculated to smother the medical sector. Dr Gilchrist Lokoel, Turkana County director of health
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