Universal Healthcare in Kitui County
From Charity Ngilu via Twitter/@mamangilu
Today I am fulfilling one of my longest held dreams of ensuring our people can easily access quality and affordable healthcare. We are launching the Kitui Universal Healthcare (UHC) that will give over 100,000 families medical insurance cover.
The medical insurance cover we are launching today in partnership with NHIF will be available to all Kitui county residents. Kitui residents will only pay Ksh. 3,000 and the Kitui couty government will top up another Ksh. 3,000 per family per year. Kitui-UHC willl enable Kitui residents to access medical services at all medical facilities within Kitui county and across Kenya including private hospitals and referral hospitals like Kenyatta National Hospital.
Special thanks to HE President Kenyatta for having UHC as one of his Big 4 Agenda and making the dream of UHC come true. Indeed it is this foregrounding of UHC by the President that has enabled Counties like Kitui take such a bold step of insuring over 85,000 residents.
UHC has been my dream for a long time since 2003 when I served as Health Minister for President Kibaki. This dream suffered some setbacks then because many people did not believe it was possible, I was perhaps well ahead of time. Even now there are many nay-sayers and doubting Thomases around UHC. Most naysayers and their agents are merchants who profit from “the business of sickness,”
Today’s UHC launch is the biggest milestone in the four years of transforming our health sector in Kitui County. Kitui County has 262,000 households where currently only about 79,320 households (30.2%) have medical insurance of any kind. These 79,000 are mostly teachers, civil servants, as well as city-based professionals and business people.
Over 60% of our population is classified as poor, and therefore lack the means to meet their day to day needs including health care. 90% of our people are dependent on public health facilities for their health care. This places a huge demand for the County Government to allocate resources to meet this demand.
Kitui has the highest number of health facilities in the whole country, at 298. Our allocation for health currently stands at Kshs.3,7 billion, nearly 33.6% of our annual budget, making health care the single biggest spender in our County by far. When I took office 4 years ago, I embarked on transforming our health sector to prepare us for UHC.
We have progressively increased our allocation to health care. We have since raised our budget to Ksh 3.7m (33.6%) from Ksh 3,020,983,950 (26.8%) of the total annual budget. We have increased our health facilities to 298 from the 180 we found in 2017. All these are fully operational. We have employed 35 new doctors bringing our doctor capacity to 102 from 67 doctors in 2017. Our nursing capacity has improved with the increase of nurses from 575 to 734 presently. In addition we have increased our other staff to 879 from 631 in 2017.
Our nursing capacity has improved with the increase of nurses from 575 to 734 presently. In addition we have increased our other staff to 879 from 631 in 2017. We had only 3 X rays facilities in 2017, we have doubled these to 7 with another 7 on course for completion. Kitui now boasts of one of the most modern digital CT scans in this region, where there was none in 2017.
Most important of all we have stepped up supply of drugs and non-pharmaceuticals in all facilities. Previously the commodities were only supplied by KEMSA, which sometimes occasioned delays when KEMSA got overwhelmed by supply demands from all over the country. We have now signed agreement with Mission for Essential Drugs Supplies (MEDS) to supply drugs and non-pharms to our facilities. We are already distributing these drugs worth Ksh 110 million to all health facilities in Kitui.
In 2018 we launched K-CHIC which covered about 126,000 households where the annual subscription was only Ksh 1,100 per year. K-CHIC was like a pilot programme for UHC, even though we didn’t call it so. The people’s enthusiastic response to K-CHIC indicated to us that indeed there was need for a comprehensive health insurance program in Kitui.
The Kitui-UHC will cover 85,000 households in this financial year. The National Government through the initiative of His Excellency the President has covered another 31,000 beneficiaries, therefore bringing the total to 116,000 households. Our people will not suffer the burden of medical bills, no need to sell livestock or land or borrow from shylocks when you or a loved one gets hospitalized because now we have Kitui UHC.
