Health Rights in Kenya

After our visit to Mbagathi District Hospital, we went on to Kenya’s largest referral, teaching and research hospital: Kenyatta National Hospital. The facility has ten floors of wards, and a staff of 4,000. In fact, KNH is overstaffed. A mere five minutes away from Mbagathi District Hospital, the halls of KNH are filled with white coats, and specialists crowd the stairways. The Comprehensive Care Center is two stories tall—a gleaming white building on the sprawling KNH grounds.

And while a single ward may be ready with 10 senior physicians, Kenyans have great difficulty getting care at the hospital. It is a tertiary facility—the last stop in Kenyan healthcare—if you manage to afford the referrals, transport and patient fees. While all services at the Mbagathi CCC are completely free, the CCC at KNH requires patients to pay a monthly consultation fee of 300 Kenyan Shillings, about 4 US dollars. This is a prohibitive cost for most Kenyans: it’s just not possible. And yet KNH receives nearly 50% of all government funding to the health sector in Kenya.

Beyond the numbers and underneath the paint lies a very different, and often unexpected, story. Improving AIDS care in Kenya is not just about the size of the CCC, or the quality of CD 4 machines, or the salaries for staff. US dollars and Kenyan Shillings don’t translate to the improved access and quality so desperately needed. The solutions involve looking beyond the individual facilities and the medicines and the most obvious numbers. We will not find all the problems at one clinic, and we won’t find the solutions in one place either.

[The Health Action AIDS delegation with staff at Kenyatta National Hospital]