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By Gatonye Gathura
Kenya: The rate at which children are abandoning cancer treatment at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Eldoret, is worrying medical workers at the institution.
The workers were recently forced to move from one village to another in Western Kenya to find out why many children had abandoned treatment.
To the dismay of the workers, many of the children had since succumbed to the disease, others were alive and appeared healthy but several others were found to be bed-ridden with their guardians having given up.
“Of the families we traced, 80 per cent of the chuldren had since died mainly because they could not afford to pay for the treatment, had no health insurance or could not travel to the hospital,” said Festus Muigai, the doctor leading the team.
A team of workers from Moi Referral, the University Medical Centre of The Netherlands, Indiana University from US, among others had identified 222 children diagnosed with cancer in a two-year period.
They found that more than half of these children had abandoned treatment after just about three months. For most of those they could trace, majority had died while those found alive were ill and suffering.
When the doctors asked the families the cause of abandoning the treatment, money and poverty were the main reasons.
“46 per cent cited financial difficulties as the reason for abandoning medication, 27 per cent said inadequate access to health insurance and 23 per cent said they encountered transportation difficulties,” Dr Muigai and his team wrote in the Journal Archives of Disease in Childhood on Friday.
Radiology machine
The hospital, which is making plans to purchase a radiology machine, has to refer patients to Kenyatta National Hospital for treatment, which could present transport problems of monumental proportions.
To illustrate how this is so, we sought out Joseph Omach of the Childhood Cancer Initiative, who has been accommodating the children once they arrive in Nairobi from their upcountry homes for the duration of treatment.
The initiative is no longer in operation.
He told of a recent case of a girl named Diana, who succumbed to cancer of the bones aged 11 after having travelled for over 1,000Km between Kenya and Uganda to seek medical attention.
To help such children, the doctors at the referral hospital rolled out a universal insurance scheme and the policy of detaining patients for unpaid bills stopped forthwith.
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