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{
    "id": 1129185,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1129185/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 580,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kikuyu, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Kimani Ichung’wah",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1835,
        "legal_name": "Anthony Kimani Ichung'Wah",
        "slug": "anthony-kimani-ichungwah"
    },
    "content": "You have seen even members of staff falling ill in their offices. With the traffic in this town, even rescuing a member of staff and taking them to hospital takes quite some time. Indeed, this a best practice all progressive Parliaments around the world adopt. Hon. Nzambia will tell you that the Liaison Committee has visited the Parliament of Ghana. Also, being an emerging democracy, and a good case study in Africa, they have such a unit in Ghanaian Parliament. It is not just parliaments, but the Central Bank of Kenya has such a health service unit for their staff. It would, therefore, not be the first public institution for Parliament to have its own health service unit. Progressive corporates, and good ones like Safaricom, have their own health service departments. They have even gone further to have units to cater for infants and children, so that Members who have young children like me can come with my one-and-a-half- year-old daughter and spend a day with her when other people in the House are busy. Maybe, I could afford an hour over lunch time to feed her. It is something that we want to encourage Members to support. This unit will not just be for use by Members of Parliament, but also the staff who are employed by both Houses of Parliament. They would access health services within the precincts of Parliament and, therefore, save on man-hours and tax payers’ time. Not just man-hours and taxpayers’ money in terms of the time they take from here to access hospitals around us in the city with massive traffic jams in the city, but also the time you take going to wait to be served in a hospital set up outside the Parliament precincts. I recently saw a survey for the blue-chip hospitals, namely, the best hospitals around the city of Nairobi, and the average waiting time in their accident and emergency units was around two-and-a-half-hours. You can imagine you have a headache and you just want to go and get checked, and maybe you had a sitting that you were to preside in the afternoon, and it is at 1.00 O’clock, and you have to go to a hospital without naming names and wait for two and a half hours. By having these units, you will be saving time for Members, House, and the country. I ask the Parliamentary Service Commission to ensure that all the recommendations that are carried in this Report are quickly implemented especially the refurbishments of our health club at Continental House. It should also ensure that the new building is completed. I must commend them, and I have seen very good progress. They should complete the building and ensure that we have facilities to have all these units that Members have been asking for. In the last Parliament, Hon. Sabina, the Member for Muranga, kept asking about the same unit when she had a baby."
}