A life of service: Dr Betty Gikonyo’s 47-year impact on Kenya’s health sector
Karen Hospital Board Chair and Founder Dr. Betty Gikonyo during the interview at the hospital on April 20, 2023.
In 1970, Dr Betty Gikonyo walked into the University of Nairobi (UoN) for a five-year degree in Medicine and Surgery.
She joined 13 other women and together they stood out in a class of more than 80 students.
The eight of them were African while the rest were White. University life was easy.
“The government not only paid the fees but it also gave us boom (a cash allowance the government disbursed to university students every month to meet their needs),” she recalls.
“It recognised the fact that 99 per cent of the (African) students came from poor families. I’d not have gone through medical school had we been told to pay fees or ask our parents to give us pocket money.”
Dr Gikonyo was born in Kiamabara village in Nyeri County in central Kenya and her parents were poor.
Reflecting on the current education system, Dr Gikonyo says, the cost is beyond the reach of the average Kenyan.
“During our time, the high school education was also inexpensive and district bursaries were at the disposal of those who needed them,” she says.
“Now, education is very expensive. From primary school, whether public or private university, the fee is exorbitant and the requirements are just too many. The government must find ways of removing blocks preventing parents from sending their children to school.”
Dr Gikonyo graduated in 1975 alongside the 13 women collegemates and all of them have since built their medical careers in-country and abroad as practising specialists and in academia.
The following year, the government posted her to Nakuru Provincial General Hospital, now Nakuru Level 6 Hospital, where she interned and served as a medical doctor.
“Those days life was easy; jobs were available. As soon as you’re qualified, you are posted…you get a salary and a government house and life goes on,” she says.
In 1978, she returned to UoN for a master’s degree in Paediatric Cardiology and graduated in 1981.
She had since been married to now Dr Dan Gikonyo, whom she had to accompany to United States of America in 1982, after he received a government scholarship to further his studies.
“I left as a housewife to look after my husband and our three children. But I had that urge that I was never really created to be a housewife and so I started searching for training opportunities,” she says.
“I was lucky to meet a progressive American professor who told me ‘if you’re ready to train as a paediatrician and you want to do cardiology, come for an interview, if you pass, we will take you.’ I went and I passed, and I was taken as a fellow at the University of Minnesota.”
Their stay gestured them to a first world of medicine and facilities, an exposure that bore a dream of starting a hospital back home.
The dream became a reality in 2006 when they opened the doors of Karen Hospital, a facility that the Ministry of Health has since elevated to Level 6 hospital since it offers highly advanced medical services and trains medical professionals.
She was the founding chief executive officer until 2020 when she handed over the leadership to her daughter and took a new role as the chairperson of the hospital’s board.
For the 47 years she has been in the health sector, she has revolutionalised the health sector while witnessing it morph into what she describes as a tragedy.
In 1993, she and her husband co-founded Heart to Heart Foundation, a medical charity of a kind targeting to save children from poor families from heart conditions.
Apart from the charity fundraising to cover the costs of conducting the children’s heart surgery, it also sensitises communities on preventing heart diseases.
“Bacterial sore throat can cause heart diseases…if they are treated early with antibiotics that child will not have a heart disease,” she advises.
“Do not tell a child to gargle with salt water, let them be treated to avoid a heart problem,” she advises.
In the 1980s and 1990s when the healthcare system was centralised, the services were reliable and efficient, she reckons.
In her view, transfer of the services to the counties in 2013, post the 2010 Constitution which paved the way for the two-level administration, dealt a “tragedy”, to the sector,
“We used to have a system that started with the lowest level of care that is a dispensary and people within (a) five kilometre (radius would access it),” she explains.
“A dispensary (would) refer (a patient) to a health centre, situated in a location. And the health centre had maternity services.”
Following the upward structure were the sub-district, district, provincial hospitals and finally referral hospitals, all of which she says had proper working systems.
“When I was practising, the availability of medicine was not an issue. What is happening now is something that should pain everybody. Devolving healthcare to the counties is a tragedy,” she says.
