Poor leadership in public hospitals and inexperienced workers are the major cause of declining quality of medical care, the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) has said.
The 2015 Economic Survey released last week revealed that the quality of health care in public hospitals is in decline causing more deaths in 2014 than in any of the previous five years.
A news report published last Tuesday jointly carried out by KEMRI, the University of Oxford, University of Amsterdam and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine arrived at a similar verdict.
The survey covered 22 level four and five hospitals spread across all counties, which are mainly referral and internship training institutions.
Protocols ignored
The facilities are responsible for the practical training of the country’s future doctors but were largely found to ignore simple treatment protocols that are clearly spelt out in Government policy.
For example, although it is Government policy that all children admitted into public hospitals should be tested for HIV, this is not happening even where the testing kits are in stock.
Only 12 out of every 100 infants are being tested for HIV and it is not being done at all in five of these high-end public hospitals. And for this, the research published in the journal Implementation Science, lays the blame on the hospitals’ administration for poor supervision.
The quality supervisory role rests with the national and country governments.
“Evidence suggests that supervision and commitment of the hospital leadership to enforcing such policies are important in adoption since testing kits are rarely missing in hospitals and were available at the time of study,” wrote the authors.
In 2012, Kenya adopted a global strategy aimed at eliminating mother-to-child HIV transmission. One of the requirements is to have all infants tested. The team, led by Dr David Gathara of KEMRI, was surprised at the variation of quality of care despite all having a similar treatment policy.
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