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{
    "id": 1419036,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1419036/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 88,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Cheruiyot",
    "speaker_title": "The Senate Majority Leader",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13165,
        "legal_name": "Aaron Kipkirui Cheruiyot",
        "slug": "aaron-cheruiyot"
    },
    "content": " Mr. Speaker, Sir, I want to thank the Committee on Health for taking leadership on a very important national issue. Unfortunately, I think today is the 56th day and the country has been unable to find a solution. This issue of the doctor's strike is not a simple matter. I have taken time to try and be as neutral as I can and listen to what the governors are saying on issues of expenditure. Many of them forward to me clips of yours truly speaking here in the Senate and reminding our county governments to balance recurrent vis-a-vis development spend. They ask me, Majority Leader, is this not you who every afternoon reminds us that all our counties are in breach of our regulations on 70-30 divide between recurrent vis-a-vis development spend? If we proceed in the manner and the route that the doctors want us to, you may either consider amending or at division of revenue, add us resources for us to be able to take on board the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that was signed in 2017. Therefore, you listen to them and you realize they have a valid point. On the other side, I have also taken time to listen and engage the doctors' union, including having a sit-down with them as late as Thursday or Friday last week. I met them somewhere deeply seated and reflecting on the challenges that they are facing. The issues that they speak about also are not matters that you can easily sweep under the carpet. Our health architecture is such that intern doctors are the real doctors who treat and attend to patients in many of our county facilities. The senior doctors and the consultants only show up maybe one afternoon or two or three days a week. However, ordinary citizens that we represent in this House meet interns when they go to our health facilities. Therefore, this issue is about their pay and their ability to live a decent life. Unfortunately, we have a centralized pay structure for all of them. It is being proposed that they be paid Kshs70,000. Yet, in their deployment, many of them are being sent to far-flung counties away from what will be their home areas. As part of the proposals that they are making, they are saying that if it is impossible to meet the Kshs200,000 that they are asking for, then at least allow them to work in their villages. Many issues come about here because there are villages, which cannot find a trained doctor within that particular region. They say if we strongly feel that because they are still students and are training, they be paid Kshs70,000, but they be allowed to work from their mother's houses to go to the clinic. That Kshs70,000 will be enough. However, so long as we expect them to work in certain parts of this country and"
}