This archive report was first published on 14 December 2019.
On the eve of Jamhuri Day, the Kenyan government announced a deal with Barbados to train Kenyan doctors, citing the country's 'excellent health system'. However, this move has been met with skepticism by health experts, who argue that it will only exacerbate the existing problems in the country's health sector.
According to Associate Professor of Psychiatry Lukoye Atwoli, the decision to train doctors in Barbados was made without consulting local experts, and will only serve to make an already bad situation worse. 'There are about a dozen medical schools in Kenya, and they are all capable of training the best doctors in the world,' he said.
Atwoli's comments come as the country continues to grapple with the consequences of devolving health services to the counties. Despite the constitutional negotiations in Naivasha in 2010, which prioritized health as a devolved service, the country's health system remains in disarray.
As the Building Bridges Initiative report has highlighted, Kenyans now want a Health Service Commission formed to standardize the management of the scarce human resources for health. However, politicians continue to display a complete disconnect between policy and practice, prioritizing foreign training programs over local capacity building.
Atwoli argues that the countries whose health systems Kenya admires did not achieve this by looking to foreign countries for help in training their health workforce. Instead, they invested heavily in their health systems and continue to produce a health workforce attuned to the needs of their own population.
Published on December 14, 2019 by Lukoye Atwoli in The Nation.
