System shows little care for health workers

According to the International Labour Organisation, governments should minimise the risk of occupational accidents and diseases by ensuring workers have health information and adequate protective clothing and equipment.

This is expected of all governments and is highly demanded during a global health crisis like a pandemic. Additionally, combating the spread of coronavirus requires that health facilities have adequate water, sanitation, hygiene, healthcare waste management, and cleaning. What this means is that a government that doesn’t meet these international requirements — as Kenya is currently doing — is infringing on the rights of its health workers.

This infringement of health practitioners’ rights warrants the sentiment, “Kenyan leadership hates its people”. However, this sentiment is often watered down and labelled as an “activist” statement.

The term activist is to make it seem as though one is anti-government. It’s also a contemptuous way of dealing with citizens who call out leadership for their failures, by delegitimising them.

Personal protective gear

Currently, there’s a callousness that’s settled into the ruling class as regards the coronavirus. The air is filled with an unbothered outlook from political leaders, whose priorities are everything else but the current despairing state of the health system.

Kenyan doctors and healthcare practitioners are dying in the line of duty, something that shouldn’t be happening, yet the anti-government sentiments carry the agenda. Doctors are being warned against demanding personal protective gear, comprehensive medical cover, employment of additional staff and five months of unpaid salaries.

Meanwhile, a majority of doctors are unable to care for themselves. And when the doctors speak out about these foundational issues, they’re ignored or dismissed as activists.

Hatred

This is precisely what hatred looks like in a systemic framework where those in charge have the option of disregarding what doesn’t align with their agenda. Leaders who hate the people will run down, plunder and destroy institutions that many vulnerable people depend on like public healthcare.

The Human Rights Watch recommends that governments should ensure health workers have access to appropriate protective equipment and that social protection programmes are in place for the families of workers who die or become ill as a result of their work, and ensure such programmes include informal workers, who represent a large share of the caregiving sector.

Kenyan healthcare continues to be let down by the government as the practitioners live in fear of death as a result of doing their job and being forced into making impossible choices.

A system that doesn’t provide health practitioners with the equipment they need, doesn’t pay them accordingly and on time, doesn’t protect them from harm while carrying out their duties and doesn’t acknowledge the hardship they encounter by swiftly mitigating, is a system that should be overhauled.

[email protected]