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{
    "id": 1143097,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1143097/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 329,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Navakholo, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Emmanuel Wangwe",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2543,
        "legal_name": "Emmanuel Wangwe",
        "slug": "emmanuel-wangwe"
    },
    "content": "prayer that representing people and legislating on their behalf should earn you good results in August this year. Hon. Owino, it is our prayer. Engage the people of Ndhiwa to make sure they again see you in this House in the next term. This Bill is good because it will address salient issues that touch on community health workers. It is not good enough to say that you pay them salaries, but it is good enough to look at all round social well-being of an employee. This Bill is going to look at the recognition of the health workers. It is going to address the issue of training community health workers, licensing and how they are going to work. In overall, it is going to address the regulation of their practice and provide for the establishment of the Community Health Workers Council. When you have a council, you have an umbrella organisation where issues can be discussed. All conversations can be done at a council level and this Bill is going to address that. This Bill is going to broker between the county governments and the national Government. How do we put policies at the national level and they are implemented at the county level? This Bill is going to address that and the issues of hand-outs. For example, some counties are paying health workers Kshs2,000 per month as stipend. Let us not pay them a stipend of Kshs2,000. I want to appreciate my county government that has stepped in the right direction. However meagre it is, it is a step in the right direction, but let us now give rise to a better way of addressing the issues of community health workers than before. The COVID-19 Pandemic has just come in. Initially, health workers were just being called midwives. They would only be assigned in villages to assist our ladies and mothers to have children, but today, community health workers have risen beyond when COVID-19 came. They are the only people who could address the issue of COVID-19 to the villagers. I come from the village of Bunyala in Itsohe, where not everyone understands English and Kiswahili. It is only the village community health worker who could address my community in our language to understand. Therefore, they are people who have lived beyond just being there to support our mothers or wives to have children, but instead, they are people who are aiding in terms of helping the community should there be a pandemic. Therefore, since this group of workers has up-scaled its responsibility, it needs a council to look at them and address their social well being. How are they being managed and administered? How do you regulate and coordinate them? How do you eliminate if there is one of them who is rotten and how do you promote that who is very helpful in the society? Therefore, this Bill has come in handy. It has come in on the benchmark of COVID-19. We have seen an example. It is a Bill which we should all support so that those who will come up with the council and the composition as listed in this Bill, can really be supported. Remember Article 43 of the Constitution guarantees every Kenyan the right to good health. Good health is not the good medicine we take. It is the steps towards taking that good medicine that addresses good health. Although it is a social Article, it is also enforceable. I must thank our President for really moving fast and implementing the UHC. His pledge to Kenyans has come to reality. We now have UHC in practice. We can see the opening up of cancer centres which are very ultramodern. With those cancer centres and UHC in force, we need people like health workers to talk to our people in the villages so that they can know that they do not have to take Piriton in the village. Instead, if they feel this condition, they can go to the next hospital. Therefore, the proposal by Hon. Owino is going to be helpful. Hon. Owino has thought it well in support of the Government’s view in enabling the UHC to trickle down to the common man. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}