Kenyans are dismayed at reports that crucial life-saving machines cannot be found at Kenya’s largest referral hospital, Kenyatta National Hospital.
If you are scheduled to undergo heart surgery, KNH is now forced to borrow a heart and lung machine from a private institution to conduct the crucial surgery, reports the Standard.
In fact, due to lack of some of the machines required for delicate surgeries, KNH has been referring its patients elsewhere, mostly private hospitals.
It is estimated that KNH conducts 1, 200 heart surgeries annually. A lung and heart machine costs Sh30 million. It will cost a patient undergoing this crucial surgery between Sh200, 000 to Sh600, 000.
It came to the fore that the lung and heart machine at KNH broke down months ago.
The National Assembly Health Committee recently found this out as it that probed a recent incident where a brain surgery was carried out on the wrong patient at KNH.
Also, a skin and grafting machine that plastic surgeons use at the hospital reportedly broke down in 2015 and was shipped to US for repair but it has not been returned yet.
Plastic surgeons have been forced to manually harvest and transplant skin on patients requiring grafting. Experts say this is painful to the patient and takes long to heal compared to using a skin grafting machine.
The Parliamentary Health Committee steered by Sabina Chege also found out that KNH does not have a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Ironically, patients requiring its services are referred to other hospitals.
This machine costs Sh200 million. A patient seeing to have a MRI head scan pays between Sh20, 000 to Sh25, 000 while the one at KNH offered the services for just Sh16, 000.
It was purchased in 2005 and has a shelf life of seven years. It lost helium which enable it to remain cool in 2016 making it technically obsolete and unserviceable.
A new one is expected in June this year. ““It has become impossible for doctors to conduct scans hence, the patients are being referred to private hospitals where the costs are high,” the committee report read as quoted by the Standard.
Also, there is only one Laparoscopy machine- a diagnostic equipment used to observe organs in the abdomen.
KNH should have four of those machines.
Chege said low budgetary allocations for KNH are partly to be blamed for the myriad challenges dogging KNH.
“The budget allocation to KNH has always been below what is required. These budgetary challenges, to some extent, contribute to the deplorable state of some of the critical equipment, medical facilities as well as human resource inadequacies in this national referral institution.”