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{
    "id": 1286913,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1286913/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 138,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Maanzo",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2197,
        "legal_name": "Daniel Kitonga Maanzo",
        "slug": "daniel-kitonga-maanzo"
    },
    "content": "community health workers must have these sorts of qualifications. How many community health workers are we training? Even the Kenya Medical Training Colleges (KMTC), which I am happy we have students in the Senate is still a national Government affair. It is not a devolved affair. It is distributed in such a way that some regions in the country do have a lot of these services there. Mr. Speaker, Sir, the people who we train, get absorbed abroad. They go to Botswana, UK or USA for further training and they never come back. Why? The county system has not been empowered enough to protect doctors and even to keep them in a certain level in the village. Just like the Act that we dealt with yesterday, we need a little more number of people who protect devolution in the way and manner we have framed this. We have left all of it to the national Government. When you form the national committee, you only have a CoG representative. CoG is so huge that we cannot have just one person or their representative who could be the Chairperson of the Committee of Health out of nine. It is no longer a county affair. This matter must be devolved to the county and let the county take full charge. More importantly, we have not talked about the financing at all. It has been abandoned. Just touch the training of medical personnel in this country. Most of them will not work for the Government. After some time, they run their own private hospitals and even some who are still working for the Government are directors in private hospitals. Therefore, we have minimum going to the people through the county government and the national Government as far as healthcare is concerned. Then there is the issue of data. That particular officer in the village keeping serious data with them even for security purposes is dangerous. When you look at Kenya differently, we have different parts of Kenya with different security challenges. If a community health officer has all the data of the village, if I am a person against the security of the nation that is the person I will completely apprehend and take hostage. This is because he has all the data and no protection or mechanism of protecting that data. So, just like in the training of pilots in this country, it has similarly happened with the training of health. We train health workers, but the best brains are taken away to work outside our country. It is something we need to think about seriously. How do we train these community health officers and how do we make sure that they are employed? We have many of them who have come out of training, but have not yet been absorbed in the counties or at the national Government. Since they have families to feed, they have to look for jobs elsewhere. When we need them such as when we have an emergency like COVID-19, we have no mechanism of getting them. If you go to a dispensary in the village, you will find that it does not have someone who will handle a serious emergency. It will not have the necessary first aid equipment. There is no necessary first aid training at that local level. People who handle"
}