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{
"id": 222638,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/222638/?format=api",
"text_counter": 216,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Kibunguchy",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Health",
"speaker": {
"id": 294,
"legal_name": "Enoch Wamalwa Kibunguchy",
"slug": "enoch-kibunguchy"
},
"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we hear, time and again, married couples having a lot of problems to an extent that we are very quickly catching up with the Western world where marriage these days has very little meaning. People get married today and tomorrow they are divorced. It is very quickly catching up in this country. I was talking about a young man who locked himself in his kitchen, took a kitchen knife and cut off his manhood. Those are events that we cannot quite comprehend. Psychology will definitely be required in incidences where we have these grisly accidents like it happened with the KQ 507 recently. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we know that there is a spectrum in human beings between what we call absolutely normal and the people who have chronic intractable psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia, severe depression et cetera . Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as we go through that spectrum, there are those who will go through what we call minor psychological illnesses. Such people do not require any medical treatment, but they require psychological treatment. These are the people who will benefit 1202 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES May 9, 2007 from the services of professional psychologists. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as I wind up, I would like to say one or two things. When the Bill is finally being published, we would like to see a situation where we have a board that takes care of the professional matters of psychologists. This Board will take care of matters of training in terms of curriculum, the institutions that will offer training, accreditation and so on. Nowadays, people come with papers, but you do not know where they trained. So, it will be up to this Board to find a way of testing these people to find out whether they are truly qualified in that field or not. The Board will also take care of the registration of psychologists so that one will not be allowed to practise unless one is registered. The Board will take care of licensing of psychologists and regulations. When we talk about regulations, we are moving to an area where we would like bodies to regulate themselves. Once the psychologists have set up their body, they should be able to regulate themselves. When we talk about regulations, we are talking about standards and discipline. We cannot allow people to call themselves professionals and yet they do not have discipline in their field. We are talking about the setting up of standards and areas where this Board will be able to deal with quacks, that is, people who are masquerading as psychologists and yet they have not been licensed to practise as such. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would also like to see the Bill providing for an association or a body that will purely deal with trade union matters of this body. Here, I mean trade union matters in terms of agitation for better pay, working conditions and so on. When we have those two bodies; that is, a board and an association, then the welfare of psychologists will be taken care of. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to mention one or two things about what is happening in the country at the moment, especially in the field of HIV/AIDS. You realise that at the moment, we have counsellors for HIV/AIDS patients. We need to have counsellors for all the terminal illnesses. All people suffering from terminal illnesses require some form of counselling or another. Allow me to talk about HIV/AIDS because this is something that we see everywhere in the country. The bodies that are dealing with HIV/AIDS have counsellors who are mostly young men and women who have just finished Form IV. They are put together for about two or four weeks, for some quick training and then they are send out there to do counselling. That, to me, is not adequate. It is, in fact, grossly inadequate. I do not think that these young men and women will have the capacity to counsel somebody properly. Therefore, one of the things that the Bill will seek to address is to regulate issues like this one in terms of training. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have so many people who purport to be marriage counsellors and yet we do not know where some of them trained. As has been mentioned here, anybody who deals with people, either in schools or workplace, would need some form of knowledge in counselling. Not all human beings are the same. So, as we welcome and support this Motion, we hope that hon. Wamunyinyi will soon come up with a Bill. I said at the beginning that we welcome him to work closely with our Ministry so that we come up with a very good document that will take care of all these issues that we are talking about and even more. We are looking at the future and as we continue to develop, we are going to get more and more people suffering from psychological disorders. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, with those remarks, I beg to support."
}