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{
    "id": 1517198,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1517198/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 118,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Sifuna",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13599,
        "legal_name": "Sifuna Edwin Watenya",
        "slug": "sifuna-edwin-watenya"
    },
    "content": "ensure that everything goes well. I wish Baba and the team that is there representing us well. The rest of us are here holding the fort. We have treated the people who work in our medical institutions with absolute contempt. I remember last year in the last session, medical interns were seated here. We, as a House, had made a promise to them that we were going to support them to ensure that not only are they absorbed into the workforce, but also that they were fairly treated and remunerated per their qualifications. I remember the big debate on whether interns were interns in the sense of the word as is used in other professions or whether these were qualified medical practitioners and full doctors who were being mistreated. I remember there was a long period when there was a doctors’ strike. Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale remembers that period and we thought that all these matters had been resolved. We speak to some of these interns and some of them were lucky to get employment in places like this gentleman in Thika Level 5, others in Nakuru, and even here in Nairobi. Some of them after being out of employment for so long, after being promised good working conditions, even those counties are not paying them salaries. Some of them have arrears of up to three or six months. As a House and the Standing Committee on Health that has just been reconstituted, we need to be serious about our medical health practitioners. Yesterday, we were talking about the way the Community Health Promoters (CHPs) are being treated. I had an occasion together with my delegation of Senators from Nairobi to have a meeting with a section of the CHPs in Nairobi. The horror stories that we heard from that group require that we, as a House, do something. You can imagine people going to work without basic protective equipment. Here in Nairobi, most of these CHPs are working as front-line workers in places such as our slum areas. When it rains, you cannot go in there without proper shoes or gumboots. Can you imagine the CHPs in Nairobi numbering over 7,000 asking a Senator like myself to buy them gumboots because the county government is unable to supply them? When I spoke to the management at Bata, Sen. (Dr.) Khalwale, one pair of gumboots is going at Kshs700. Everybody knows my salary and you know what the taxman has done to our pay slips. How can a Senator be expected to spend Kshs5 million on buying gumboots for CHPs and yet, we resource our county governments properly for them to be able to equip our CHPs to work for us? When we talk about the deteriorating levels of health services in counties and the statement that was brought by Sen. Faki, we also need to look at the financing element for our hospitals. I was speaking to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mbagathi Hospital today to just find out the status of the repayment by SHA. This was prompted because when I looked at my payslip again, I was deducted Kshs32,000. We were told that this will be the panacea of all our problems in the health sector. The CEO at Mbagathi tells me that they are billing SHA Kshs4 million per day."
}