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{
    "id": 594599,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/594599/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 196,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Musyoka",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 794,
        "legal_name": "Susan Mbinya Musyoka",
        "slug": "susan-mbinya-musyoka"
    },
    "content": "The main purpose of having emergency medical services is to provide immediate medical care to those who need it, without which heart attacks and accidents would lead to many more fatalities. Emergency medical services simply exist in order to give us all a better quality of life. Emergency medical services provide and aid medical assistance, from primary response to definitive care involving personnel trained in rescue, stabilisation and transportation. The benefits of emergency medical services include facilitation of prompt response in emergencies, decrease of mortality and morbidity, especially in trauma cases; decrease of mortality in medical emergencies, improvement of efficiency in healthcare provision, enhancement of ability to handle mass casualties and disasters such as we normally have in our country, and increase in public confidence in healthcare systems. Just recently, we lost four babies at Kang’undo Hospital immediately after birth. It is my strong belief that if the medical personnel who were handling the new born babies immediately resuscitated them, we could have saved those four babies. It is important that all medical personnel have a clear understanding of how to handle emergencies. We need to have a well coordinated system or mechanism of handling medical emergencies, including transporting critically ill patients from one level of care to the next. Taking into account the current situation, as far as emergency medical care is concerned in Kenya, and knowing that nobody should be denied emergency medical treatment, it is very important that we have a curriculum whereby all the people handling medical emergencies know exactly what they need to do. Kenya offers no formal training opportunities in the public institutions in the field of emergency medicine as a specialty. Many of the specialists that we have, have been trained outside the country. Most of them are not recognised as specialists. It is important that we have the different levels of medical personnel getting training on emergency care. Delivery of emergency healthcare in Kenya is quite different from that of well developed countries. However, we can improve in that area since we have the capacity to train and make sure that we have high quality services in this country. Right now, we have many ambulances in the country, with the coming up of the county governments. It is important that those who handle patients in those ambulances know exactly what they are supposed to do. Most emergency centres are staffed by clinical officers and nurses who work independently or alongside medical officers to provide urgent and emergency care to large rural populations. Clinical officers are not physicians but they can be trained so that they can handle emergencies that end up at their facilities before transferring such patients appropriately. We do not have a certification system in our public healthcare system to ensure that clinical officers, nurses and all other cadres of medical personnel are trained on trauma care and emergencies. For us to move from underdevelopment as far as emergency is concerned, we need to institute emergency medical training. We should also have a curriculum appropriate for our medical personnel. None of the public universities or colleges offers any training on emergency medical care. We have the AAR Health Care, St. John’s Ambulance, the Red Cross, and other organisations that offer training. We need a certification by the Ministry of Health so that we have recognized certificate for people who handle emergency cases of patients. They should be highly trained, qualified and have confidence to manage such patients. Establishing a The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}