Murang’a Governor Irungu Kang’ata has stipulated various measures to boost service delivery at the Murang’a Level-5 hospital.
On Thursday after he visited the health facility, the governor expressed concerns on lack of essential supplies in the county referral hospital. He lamented the case where patients share beds and those admitted lacked of food.
Kang’ata gave the chief officer of finance an ultimatum of two weeks to ensure the hospital gets essential supplies like drugs and meals for patients.
He noted that the county will be getting drugs from KEMSA saying they are doing plans to clear debt the county owes the authority.
“There is an urgent invention to restore provision of better services in this hospital among other local public health centres. When the assembly will be convened the supplementary budget will be done to cater for the areas which need to be prioritized,” he added.
Kang’ata stated that already they have proposed one of the local doctors for the position of executive member of health.
“We have proposed the name of a doctor who has served this hospital for a long time for the CEC of health position. The person will wait for vetting by the assembly,” added the governor.
He further gave a directive for salary arrears especially for health workers to be paid within a period of two weeks.
“It’s unfortunate for workers to go for several months without salary. The chief finance officer needs to pay all county workers within a period of two weeks as claiming there is no exchequer does not make any sense,” he asserted.
The county chief further talked about urgent plans to digitize some of the services in the facility so as to boost service delivery.
“Record keeping, procurement, payments among other services should be digitized to ensure there is effectiveness in serving the patients,” he added.
Meanwhile Kang’ata who was accompanied by his deputy Stephen Munania said his administration will rescind construction of cancer centre which was started by previous administration saying they will give priority on construction of new wards and a modern causality centre.
The proposed cancer centre was started by Mwangi wa Iria’s administration in 2020 but stalled due to what they said was lack of funds.
“No need to have white elephant projects, we will give priority to what is urgently needed and from consultations we established the hospital needs more wards and a better causality.
“Some of the facilities are also dilapidated thus need to be replaced like beds among other equipment,” he further stated.
Some residents expressed optimism that the new administration will bring better changes especially in the health sector.
Mary Wanjiku, a resident from Kandara decried how they have been subjected to source prescribed drugs from private chemists asking the new governor to ensure all the public health facilities including dispensaries have supplies of medicine.
Wanjiku observed that due to poor services in the local hospitals, they have been forced to seek treatment at health facilities in neighbouring Kiambu County.
“The suffering to get health care in Murang’a has been too much. The money given for health care needs to be prudently used to ensure health is much improved,” she remarked.
By Bernard Munyao and Purity Mugo
