HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"id": 233103,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/233103/?format=api",
"text_counter": 200,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Ojiambo",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 362,
"legal_name": "Julia Auma Ojiambo",
"slug": "julia-ojiambo"
},
"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I beg to move that The Nutritionists and Dieticians Bill be read a Second Time. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I thank the House for granting me leave to bring back this Bill. When we debated the Motion relating to this Bill, we got a lot of information from Members. But above that, I want to thank the Ministries and departments and friends from outside the Government who contributed to the ideas that we have been able to put together to bring this Bill to this House. I want to thank the Ministries of Health, Office of the President, Agriculture, Planning and National Development and the private sector and many other Members of this House who have helped us to put together ideas and constitute this Bill. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the position of nutritionists and dieticians in this country is still wanting in that up to now, there has been no law that has regulated any activity in this area. This means that even the workers in this field are lost; they do not know where to go. It is a good thing that today, we can start to debate a Bill that is going to regulate the activities of this profession. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this Bill seeks to provide for the training, registration and licensing of nutritionists and dieticians to provide for the regulation of their standards and practice to ensure their effective participation in matters relating to nutrition and dieticians and for connected purposes. To achieve this objective, the Bill has provided for administrative and financial provisions, examination, registration and licensing provisions, disciplinary and miscellaneous provisions to protect the profession from abuse and penalties for breakers of law established by this Bill. There are also Schedule I, that will regulate the conduct of the Institute and Schedule II, that will regulate the conduct of business of the Council. Finally, there is of course the Memorandum of Objects and Reasons. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this Bill establishes an institute called the Nutritionists and Dieticians institute, which will be a body corporate. The Institute will be governed by a council which is established in this Bill at Clause 4. The Council as a body has membership which has been listed in the Bill that includes the professional bodies that subscribe to nutrition and dietetics profession. It brings together professionals who know what this whole field is about. Up to now, in this country, very few people understand what nutrition and dietetics is about. We want to give these people the opportunity to practise their profession. We also want, through this Institute, for them to be able to subscribe to the welfare of the people of this nation. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, when we were describing the activities of this body at the Motion level, we touched on various aspects of what is happening in the Kenyan population today. We mentioned that Kenyans today are either hungry or malnourished, or have got plenty to eat, and a lot of them are becoming obese. We also recognised that out of all these, there is a new opportunity for diseases that used to be subscribed to developed nations cropping into Kenya very fast such as obesity, cardiac conditions, diabetes, cancer and many other conditions. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we also talked about issues in our environment that we are not able to handle or control. These includes food dumping in our market, introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and so many other things. As scientists, we know that some of these issues could contribute to a new development in the disease pattern in this country. If we are not going to monitor this new development, then it could turn out to be a problem for our health scientists. November 23, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3923 We also mentioned that nutritionists and dieticians have a role to play in the diagnosis of diseases. When we were discussing this Bill in a workshop recently, one of the participants gave us an experience she had gone through in a hospital. Surgeons in that hospital were ready to chop off a patient's thumb because it had become sore and literally rotting. The nutritionist stopped the surgeons from going on with their surgery and told them to give her two weeks to monitor the patients progress after which she would tell them when to proceed with the surgery. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the nutritionist told us that after two weeks she went back to the surgeon with the patient and showed him the patient's thumb. Indeed, the sore thumb had healed and dried up. This means that all that the patient required was a certain intake of vitamins and minerals. This goes to emphasise the point I had mentioned earlier on that it is important to have nutritionists working alongside doctors, especially after doctors have done diagnosis of a patient's disease. If we do that, a lot of suffering can be avoided. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, to be able to achieve these objectives and implement some of these very important aspects of disease diagnosis and prevention, this Bill intends to give powers to practitioners in this field to practise their knowledge. This will be achieved by the help of this Bill because it establishes an institute called the \"Kenya Institute of Nutritionists and Dieticians\". This body is going to be run by a council which is meant to enforce and bring all that is good in this profession, but more importantly bring the professionals together and empower them to decide on their direction and control their practice. With regard to this council, we recognise that nutritionists do not work alone. This is a multi-sectoral area because there are people from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, the private sector and the Government who will come together to form this council. This body must be able to elect its own members so that it is fully mandated to operationalise its work. The people who are elected to work in the council shall work for three years, but can seek re-election for another term of three years. This means that they can only serve for six years so that others are given a chance to serve in the council. We also realised that we not only need to give an opportunity to people of this country. We know that most Kenyans have travelled far and wide. We have nutritionists and dieticians who are working with us now and have been trained in countries like Canada, India, Australia and other countries in Africa. It will be of interest to note that many countries in Africa have not reached the level of discussion where we are in this House. So, we shall be setting a pace also for a number of countries in Africa to come up with a legal framework that can help us, as a continent, to start developing our own standards. This country, and this region at large, has depended a lot on what is foreign. The African Continent literally depends on what the Europeans have developed and now what Asians have developed. This is because our own standards are wanting. We do not have food tables or knowledge of what is good and can promote health in our own context. We also do not have recommended allowances for various populations in our country. All these areas can only be addressed if we empower practitioners in this field to sit and work together and, therefore, advance the knowledge that they have. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have a lot of institutions in this country that will offer space for this work to continue. We have both private and public universities. We also have a college of nutrition here in Karen. There is the Medical Training College in Nairobi and many other institutions under the Ministry of Education that can carry out research and develop research material, information and language that can be applied to our own people. We want, through this institute of Kenya Nutritionists and Dieticians which will be run by the council we are establishing in this Bill, to be able to look at examinations and standards of training of practitioners in this Bill so that we can allow our own council to award certificates to people who qualify from this institute. The council will also examine those who are coming from 3924 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES November 23, 2006 outside with the knowledge they have and assimilate them into our environment so that they can contribute to this very vital area of national development. In this Bill, we have sought to establish a disciplinary committee which we felt is very important. Today, anybody can walk on our streets and call themselves nutritionists and dieticians and there will be nobody to question them. This is simply because we do not have a legal framework or rules and regulations that we can fall back to and say, \"You have violated this law or you have impinged on the rights of other practitioners.\" So, in our disciplinary provision, there are penalties that will be meted on those people who are out to practises when they do not have the necessary certificates. The penalties also target those who are out to impersonate dieticians and nutritionists. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we also have a provision for registration. We have proposed that men and women who are practising as nutritionists and dieticians, under this law, must be properly registered through the council's committee of registration. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, all these put together, we are looking at a situation where we can now say that in this country we will be able to find nutritionists who are able to say \"no\" to what they think is not right whether they work in markets, prisons, hospitals or in institutions like schools. They should be able to pick up things from shelves, and by an established law, analyse and advise the Government that this is not good for our people. We are talking about a cadre of people who will work alongside doctors. For instance, if a doctor prescribes drugs to a patient and then also allows an unqualified dietician in the same hospital to give the wrong type of foods to that same patient, then that doctor's drugs will not be effective. We are looking at a situation where we want to collectively manage our health for Kenyans because a healthy nation is also a wealthy one. A healthy nation can command an effective workforce. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this nation spends a lot of time distributing food to the hungry. Nowadays, we also hear from surveys and health practitioners that a lot of our children are malnourished. We are also informed that a lot of our women of child-bearing age are malnourished and sickly. We also know that a large section of our people are suffering from various controllable diseases and these are things that can easily benefit from the knowledge that we have. This knowledge in nutrition has not been tapped, consolidated and utilised to help our people use it to their own self benefit. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to give an opportunity to this House to debate this Bill because when we were discussing its Motion, there was a lot of interest from the Floor and a lot of hon. Members have a lot of knowledge of what we want to do because for the first time in this country, we are coming up with this legal framework to look into this area that has been neglected. We want to ensure that nutritionists feel that they are also part of the professionals of this nation. Therefore, the institute will work together with other professionals to make sure that dieticians and nutritionists in this country form a workforce of practitioners who are professionals with recognised degrees. Under this law, we are opening opportunities for this country to comfortably award certificates, degrees and diplomas at all levels. We are seeing in the near future, our institutions producing very able dieticians and nutritionists locally with not only under-graduate degrees but also with their master degrees, PhDs and post-doctoral degrees who are able to command the science of nutrition that is very vital to the welfare and health of our nation. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to emphasise that good nutrition is very important but good nutrition alone, as a knowledge, is not adequate. Dieticians are a big workforce along with nutritionists who must be empowered to control the welfare of our people, not only at home, but also in our institutions like hospitals, schools and hotels. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to finish by saying that consumer education for our nation is very important. Today, if you go to the supermarkets, you will find our people busy buying November 23, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3925 goods that have been brought from countries where they had probably been thrown off the shelves because they were considered not good enough for human consumption. However, we lavish them and you see mamas, babas and children on those shelves picking up very obsolete items for consumption that are not eaten in other nations. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, today, our nation consumes a lot of sugar and fat and these are the foodstuffs that have contributed towards our children becoming obese and some of them developing various conditions in early childhood that in a few years back were seen as diseases of adults. We want to ensure that the sanitary conditions of the food eaten not only at home but also in public institutions and even markets is clean. We want a situation where our nutritionists and dieticians can walk into hotels and other service areas and be able to say: \"Please, this cannot go on because it is detrimental to the health of our people\". We have a lot of diarrhoea, asthmatic conditions and other petty conditions that kill our children alongside tropical diseases that we know and this can also be supervised together with other items that the nutritionists and dieticians can look at from the market shelves and other institutions. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in finishing, I just want to thank those that have helped us once more to develop this Bill and thank Parliament for having supported us in hosting workshops where we have sat together to develop the draft that we have. I want to mention that in the draft we have you will find a few words that are obsolete that we are going to mop up as we discuss. For instance, the gender language has not been very sensitive and where we have a word like \"Chairman\", I want this word to be automatically corrected to mean a \"Chairperson\" so that we are all properly accommodated. We also have harmonised the arrangements so that what we had called a \"board\" is now the \"council\" of the institute. So, where we refer to a \"board\", it will automatically be referring to the \"council\" of the institute that I have been making reference to in my remarks. With those few remarks, I want to move and ask hon. Boit to second."
}