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Governor Rotich's 100 days-facelift plan at county referral hospital
Elgeyo Marakwet Governor Wisley Rotich (in a blue tie) receives a consignment of drugs worth Sh7 million from Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (KEMSA) on September 1, 2022.
Iten County Referral Hospital (ICHR) in Elgeyo Marakwet County is expected to undergo a major transformation in the next 100 days in order to improve services.
The changes include expanding the outpatient department, where more consultation rooms will be added. Old linen will also be changed, new Governor Wisley Rotich said.
This is part of a raft of measures the governor has announced that are meant to resuscitate the ailing health sector in Elgeyo Marakwet.
It follows an uproar among locals over poor services and lack of essential drugs across the county’s 129 health centres.
At ICRH, the only Level Four hospital in the county, patients have been lamenting poor services.
On his tour of the facility, the governor revealed his plans to turn it into a semi-autonomous hospital in a bid to make services more efficient.
“Within the next 100 days, ICRH will undergo a major transformation. I will make the facility semi-autonomous and to be headed by a chief executive officer, who will be answerable to my office,” he said.
“By doing this, we will be able to effectively improve services at a facility which handles referrals from all the other facilities. My administration will ensure constant and timely procurement of drugs at the hospital.”
Mr Rotich said as a result of lack of drugs and poor services, patients were suffering, forcing them to seek treatment at faraway hospitals.
“We need to have real-time records on how drugs are issued in our health facilities. We are putting up an elaborate monitoring system that will also help us establish relevance of drugs in different parts of the county according to prevailing health challenges in given areas,” he said.
The governor also assured health workers that their salaries and allowances will be paid promptly, saying staff are a key driver of a prosperous health system.
“We plan to hire more health workers. But even as we work on our capacity to do so, we need to ensure the ones we have currently, though not adequate, are remunerated on time and also taken through capacity building programmes,” he said.
He said he had held discussions with Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) CEO Terry Kiunge Ramadhani on the issue of stocking all facilities with drugs and other medical supplies.
“On Thursday morning, we received a consignment of pharmaceutical supplies worth Sh7 million from Kemsa. This is the first consignment and the agency is going to deliver other consignments in the course of the week that will be distributed to all health facilities across the county,” he said.
The governor called on Elgeyo Marakwet residents to be watchful and report cases of drugs bearing Kemsa or GOK labels being sold in private outlets.
He directed ICRH management to ensure that no patient is sent to purchase drugs from private chemists.
He urged them to purchase essential drugs. “I don't want to hear again [of] cases where patients are referred to private chemists to get drugs,” he said.
