EDITORIAL: Stop playing games with the lives of Kenyans

Editorials

EDITORIAL: Stop playing games with the lives of Kenyans

Thursday, February 28, 2019 22:03

By EDITORIAL

The lack of sufficient drugs and other medical supplies has been a perennial challenge in Kenya’s public hospitals and clinics.

It is, therefore, incomprehensible how the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) finds itself racing against time to deliver drugs in its stores worth more than Sh1.2 billion that are nearing expiry.

The situation is already looking grim as drugs worth about Sh2.5 million have expired, while others valued at Sh213.4 million have just one month before they go bad.

How this can be allowed to happen in a country whose health facilities always complain of insufficient supplies is quite baffling.

It’s such a shocking paradox that we face the problem of lack of drugs and at the same time that of expiring medicines. It simply does not add up and Kenyans need answers on how we got here in the first place.

That another set of drugs worth Sh1 billion have a shelf-life of only seven months can only serve to compound the problem.

Such an expiry period is too short as per best pharmaceutical practices.

Even if these drugs are immediately released, all of them may not be used before they are rendered useless by their use-by date.

This mixture of problems brings to the fore the cavalier manner in which public officials handle health matters. This must urgently change. We cannot have a situation where patients have to go through pain, or even die, yet the drugs they need are rotting in stores.

It is also a double tragedy that patients go without drugs as taxpayers lose millions of shillings when medical supplies expire before they are used. Kemsa and the Health Ministry owe Kenyans a clear explanation. Perhaps at this point it is pertinent to ask for how long has this been going on.

It is possible that more drugs have expired before and millions of shillings gone down the drain. It also makes sense to argue that may be some lives that have been lost could have been saved if the drugs had found their way to hospitals faster than is the case now.

We must never play games with Kenyans’ health.