Poor working conditions that led to the death of patients sunk the late Dr Lydia Wahura Kanyoro to depression and ultimately her death.
She did not hide her dismay for poor working condition for doctors and a broken system that did not prioritize the health sector.
This pushed her to her death on Saturday last week when she committed suicide. She injected two anesthetic drugs into her system and died moments later in her deep sleep.
Dr Wahura was a post graduate Pediatrics Student at UoN. On the day she committed suicide, she had walked out of class.
In a series of posts on Facebook, she painted a picture of a medic under distress. She complained how the government consigned the sector to oblivion and swayed public perception in its favour.
“…when a system is bad, it is even worse. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words how much losing patients I knew never needed to die messed with my mental health… had to see too many lives slip through their hands, lives which could have been saved,” a part of a December 8 post read.
Dr Wahura at one point left for the private sector where she earned less because working in a public facility overwhelmed her
“It was slowly killing me to work as a precursor to the morgue instead of [working] as a doctor.
“My mum asked me why I was leaving [the well paying government job] and the words that came out of my mouth were that I felt like a witch doctor,” she said.
She recalled a time when she lost three babies in a single afternoon and was forced to work under appalling conditions among them stitching a patient using with light from a torch.
“..had to close people’s abdomen’s under torchlight..or had to let three babies die in one afternoon because I didn’t have what I needed to save them.”
These are the events that sunk her into depression and she took away her life.
