Africa-Press – Kenya. The Siaya County Referral Hospital (SCRH) still has no medicine, two weeks after pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical supplies were delivered to the facility.
On Thursday, September 22, 2022, Siaya governor James Orengo flagged off supplies worth Sh45 million to hospitals in the county, SCRH included.
Speaking then, the county’s health executive Dismus Wakla, said that the supplies had brought to an end a four-months-long medicine dry spell at the facility.
“Our hospitals were operating like shells for the last four months,” Wakla said on September 22.
But a spot-check by the Star on September 27, October 2, 3 and 5, revealed that patients at the county’s largest public health facility were still not receiving medicine as per their doctor’s prescriptions.
The shelves at the hospital’s ‘Main Pharmacy’ were nearly empty and poorly arranged, communicating no signs of the consignments ever making their way there.
Patients and caregivers received either nothing completely or just one or two of their prescriptions.
On the morning of October 4, the Star interviewed 13 dejected patients and caregivers.
The majority got not even a dosage of their prescriptions. The lucky ones got some of the prescribed drugs.
Many are left without the most basic drugs like Panadol, Bruffen, Cetrizine and Ampiclox.
Mary (not her real name) travelled 19 kilometres on a motorbike from Uranga to and got to Siaya’s top public hospital on October 3 at 6am.
“My anaemic child developed complications at night and I made a plan to arrive here early,” Mary told the Star.
But it was not until 8am that the sick child could be examined by a medic because, as she said, the SCRH was still “sleeping” when they arrived.
She got to the stage of getting drugs at the pharmacy at 12 noon.
The Star watched Mary complain, bitterly, upon being told none of the four drugs prescribed was available.
“I have been told that there is no medicine; that I can buy from outside the hospital.”
Earlier on, in 2015, Mary lost a child to anaemia.
“My child will die, like his sibling before him if I do not get drugs,” Mary expressed her fear.
She was among the many patients who wanted to know where medicines taken to the facility two weeks ago disappeared to.
“I am told to buy medicine from a private pharmacy yet it is lack of money that prompted my early rise to this place.”
She lamented the fact that she borrowed fare to and from the facility and did not find relief for her groaning infant.
“It is only wealthy patients who will survive if this trend continues,” she pointed out.
A family from Kabura in Alego Usonga was also at the hospital on October 3 with a one-and-a-half-year-old baby.
Out of the five prescriptions, they got two. They were told to buy the missing three from a private pharmacy.
Strangely, in their case, as seen by the Star, the family paid Sh130 for the two medicines that they had found at the Pharmacy.
But the hospital’s service charter states that any child under five is treated free of charge.
The hospital superintendent, Alex Liech, was not available for comment.
His secretary referred the Star to the county’s health executive Wakla.
Wakla too was not available, only saying on SMS that “deliveries are still ongoing, including Tuesday when we received other consignments”.
Last week, Governor James Orengo, while at a funeral in Ugunja, said he was aware some of the supplies that had been channelled to one of the hospitals had been pilfered.
However, he never gave the details about the same.
During the flagging off of the initial five trucks from KEMSA, the governor warned relevant officers against pilfering their supplies to private pharmacies and homes.
According to Orengo, the five trucks delivered the supplies to hospitals in Alego, Ugenya and Ugunja sub-counties.
Orengo said the other three sub-counties of Rarieda, Bondo and Gem were to receive their doses in less than a week from then.
It was not immediately clear as to whether the latest consignments that Wakla mentioned were dispatched to the foregoing sub-counties that had not received anything or not.
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