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{
    "id": 915771,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/915771/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 243,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Ugenya, MDG",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. David Ochieng",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2955,
        "legal_name": "David Ouma Ochieng'",
        "slug": "david-ouma-ochieng"
    },
    "content": "The number of accidents that happen on our roads every day that lead to people suffering from spinal injuries are many, but we only have one hospital in the whole country. That is why, like I said, you hear people dying from very treatable diseases and injuries because we have refused to invest. Now that we have a devolved system, why can we not have one hospital per region? I am sure Kijabe Hospital does a better job than what our public hospitals do today. It is a small hospital in Kijabe. Everybody who has a spinal injury now goes there yet we have a national hospital that is given public money. Our priorities are not right. You cannot provide UHC if you cannot support your very basic referral hospitals. The KNH is 30 to 40 years old. The kind of flake that it takes every day is too much. If you go to the hospital, you will find that the kind of services they provide are good. It is only that they are overstretched because they lack what Hon. Millie Odhiambo called “a proper support system.” We have made the hospital to be a business. We do not post people who know what is supposed to be done in terms of management. The KNH has not had a CEO for the last more than three years. That speaks of how we think of it and where our priorities are. We manage things in a way that they do not reflect our values and principles. If you want to offer UHC, then we must see it in the seriousness that you treat KNH, the most important hospital in this country. What have we done with it? We have heard it said that if the Principal Secretary is a Kalenjin, then you have to post there a Kalenjin CEO. If the PS is a Kikuyu, then try to push for a Kikuyu CEO. That is not how you run hospitals. If you set up boards and you have one that is run by five or seven members from the same tribe, it means you do not want to provide healthcare. What you are doing is trying to control resources there. People do not look at KNH as a health provision centre. They are looking at it in terms of how much is there or how much medicine is there and how much they can procure. We will always get it wrong. If we stop looking at our health systems for what they are and look at the money that goes there, we will never get it right. Look at how we have gone about classifying hospitals. The Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Hospital in Kisumu is the biggest hospital in that part of the country. It is not yet a referral hospital. It is a county hospital. Why can we not upgrade it to a referral hospital for the whole country? It has been there since the 1960s, but because of the politics of that part of the country, they have decided it will remain to be a county hospital. This is the case and yet it serves the whole of western Kenya. We must deal with this kind of issues. If you are going to provide UHC, then you must have the referral hospitals in almost every region, if possible, in each of the former provinces and the current counties. Why should people be travelling all the way from North Eastern or Nyanza to KNH when they can have these services provided near them? The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}