GYN CHRONICLES
Training And Healthcare Personnel
By Dr . Maureen Owiti
“ Governors have reached an agreement not to pay doctors on study leave and have asked the Ministry of Health to take up the responsibility .
This comes amid complaints by medics across the country that governors have been blocking their attempts to seek specialized training .
The Council of Governors ( CoG ) stated that they will continue to support doctor ’ s training but insisted that they be paid by the national government while on study leave .
The governors made the announcement following the completion of a two-day meeting at the Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort & Spa in Mombasa .” An excerpt from one of the online news articles .
The usual rhetoric is an aim to reduce budget costs . I cry for Wanjiku every day . This is the folly that has befallen us . We are always told that decisions have consequences . Yes , we may be in the aftermath of the “ Earthquake ”, however this issue came up at the tail end of last year and we as doctors remained mumb on the subject . Dr . Simon Kigondu just in case you have agitated for the profession my apologies but even if you have , it unfortunately did not get the same media attention as the council of Governors .
How did we get here ? For one to understand the genesis of this major issue called training one must understand the progression of medical training in this country . Pardon me as I ’ ll only dwell on the training of medical doctors . Just recently someone managed to dig up a photo of the some of the first batch of undergraduate medical students in the country . This was at the then University College Nairobi , that began on 3rd July 1967 with 30 students . At that time university Education was fully funded by the Government and all graduating doctors did internship and were automatically absorbed into the civil service and posted to various stations across the country depending on the service need .
What one must understand is that the infrastructure and teaching staff not to mention practical sites for this undertaking is enormous and therefore the cost prohibitive , which is why many major private universities in the country have not undertaken the course . The only private universities offering medicine are Mount Kenya University , Kenya Methodist University and Uzima University .
On light touch it was in social media how currently there is a shortage of cadavers ( dead bodies ) for anatomy and how some people felt that the media house lacked news to the extent of writing stories that should belong only in medical journals . It is very interesting that the shortage cause is a change in the burial systems of the Maa and Kikuyu communities as they previously did not bury but abandoned the bodies and left them for scavenging wild animals to eat . At that time the then professors would collect these bodies and use them for instruction . Currently due to changing culture and consumption of land this practice has been abandoned and internment is now the most common way Kenyans accord their deceased kin .
The importance of this is that anatomy is the basis on which medicine is practiced and all doctors spend countless hours trying to master the anatomy of the human body . You can imagine a surgeon operating with no clue what they are removing or cutting . Anatomy provides the guideline . Anatomy is usually taught in the first year of medical school for this purpose and requires these bodies . We are not sufficiently philanthropic or aware that we can offer our bodies for research , science and transplants once we transit this world . This topic is taboo and the reason many Kenyans do not write wills or succession plans .
Back to training . Following completion of internship , the initial doctors in the country then had to look for government sponsorship in order to do post-graduate training . As we do internship currently there are 6 rotations : Medicine , Surgery , Paediatrics , Obstetrics and Gynaecology , Mental Health , and Community Health . We had the first four as our rotations and therefore for a hospital to qualify to be an internship centre it had to have specialists in all these fields in order to supervise and mentor the interns .
Please note the shortest medical course is 5 years and currently the country has reverted to a 6 year course for undergraduate and one cannot obtain a license in any country to practice the profession without completing one year internship .
To date the National Government
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