Medics, participate in ongoing healthcare conventions

As part of our suffrage cycle, we are in an electioneering period with the General Election slated just over a month away. Consequently, various political outfits have been planning and undertaking healthcare conventions to outline their manifestos for the healthcare sector.

These dialogues are occurring at both national and regional levels of government. It is paramount that medical practitioners actively participate in these conventions.

Given their daily encounters with the intricate permutations of our healthcare services; at community, patient and system-wide levels, medics would best provide an accurate understanding of the current situation as well as possible solutions.

Often, half-baked policies are fronted in the healthcare sector because of a lack of involvement of medical practitioners in their conceptualisation and are dead on arrival once their implementation phases begin.

Therefore, the various professional associations representing the medical workers such as the Kenya Medical Association, Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union, Clinical Officers Council, Kenya Union of Clinical Officers, Nursing Council of Kenya, Kenya National Union of Nurses and others must undertake active participation in these ongoing health conventions.

Their involvement would provide a better practical understanding of the current challenges to ameliorate the same. As this occurs, it would be prudent to utilise an eco-system approach. In this approach, the high interconnectedness of the different players in the healthcare sector can be compared to a community of living organisms constantly adapting and evolving to survive.

This provides for opportunities for competing as well as collaborating on available resources, co-evolving, and jointly adapting to internal and external disruptions; all with an overarching goal of improving healthcare workers’ welfare and patient outcomes.

The current disruptions in healthcare traverse across public, private as well as non–governmental sectors and border on how well we can achieve universal health coverage in a Kenyan context.