Medics suffer as PPEs waste away

As healthcare workers threaten to strike next week for lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), millions of the kits are lying in stores of local manufacturers with no takers, the Sunday Nation has learnt.

The situation has been worsened by the probe at the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) and counties lacking money to procure the kits.

The government announced that it would engage local manufacturers for the PPEs after some imported kits had quality issues.

 Six manufacturers had by August attained national and international quality standards for the medical grade PPE.

These are Texplast Industries in Kikuyu, Ruiru-based Alpha Knits, Manchester Outfitters in Nairobi County, Kitui County Textile Centre (Kicotec), Shona EPZ near Athi River town and Bedi Investment Limited in Nakuru.

Kemsa cannot procure the gear until the investigations by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission over alleged procurement irregularities are completed. At the same time, the agency has Sh6.2 billion PPE wasting away in its stores that cannot be sold at the price that they were procured.

Initially, Kemsa had contracted local manufacturers to supply the kits, then they were later supplied to the counties through the agency.

1,000 trial kits

One of the manufacturers who did not want to be mentioned said the company only supplied the first 1,000 trial kits and that was it. For six months now, the agency has not paid for the gadgets.

The factory has since scaled down production from 10,000 kits to zero. Some of the employees were laid off. It is stuck with over 200,000 PPEs.

“Everything happening at Kemsa needs to be quickly concluded so that we go back to production. I feel very bad that our healthcare workers are dying because they do not have PPEs yet we have millions in all the factories around,” said a source, who spoke to the Sunday Nation.

At another factory, about 157,000 kits are ready for distribution, however, no one is coming forth to make an order.

Counties are also in a dilemma of how to procure the kits since they do not have the money as Covid-19 infections rise.

The Ministry of Health had given the counties a go ahead to procure their own PPEs, but this is not possible as the National Treasury has not sent money to the devolved units for three months.

Strike notice

“Going forward, the counties will assess and procure quality PPEs for their health workers, this will ease any county from complaining about lack of PPEs,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said in October.

Council of Governors chairman Wycliffe Oparanya told the Sunday Nation that most counties lack PPEs.

“I am afraid, if we continue this way, then we will lose most of our healthcare workers,” he said

Last week, health workers issued a strike notice unless the government addresses their safety issues.

This threat comes after 32 health workers succumbed to the virus with 12 of them being doctors, 10 nurses, seven clinical officers and the remaining in other cadres.