Over 100 Psychiatric Patients Escape As Kenya Doctors Strike

[Stephen Cohen]

Over 100 Psychiatric Patients Escape As Kenya Doctors Strike

Images showed patients scaling walls to escape the psychiatric hospital in Kenya.

NAIROBI, KENYA: More than 100 patients escaped from Kenya's only psychiatric hospital on Monday as doctors and nurses joined a national hospital strike for pay rises.

Nairobi Police Commander Japheth Koome told AFP that police had launched an operation to return the patients to the hospital, as videos on social media showed them climbing over the hospital walls and running down a nearby highway in the capital.


"We have already arrested dozens of the... patients who had escaped in an ongoing operation," Koome said.

"The doctors messed (up) by leaving the patients unattended."

Some 5,000 Kenyan doctors, pharmacists, dentists and nurses went on strike on Monday after negotiations between unions and government over a pay rise collapsed on Sunday.

Unions are demanding a 300-percent pay rise for doctors and 25- to 40-percent pay rise for nurses that was agreed upon in a 2013 collective bargaining agreement, but has yet to be implemented.


Hundreds of striking workers marched to the National Treasury wearing lab coats, masks and theatre caps before police dispersed the crowd with tear gas.

"No amount of intimidation, no amount of propaganda will make us change our determination," said Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists' Union (KMPPDU) chairman Samuel Oroko.

He said the public should be prepared for "the longest strike ever" as doctors would not return to work until their demands were met.

The striking doctors and their supporters point to recent scandals in corruption-plagued Kenya in which millions of dollars have been embezzled or gone unaccounted for, while the doctors struggle to get their wage increases.

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/over...-doctors-strike-1634352?pfrom=home-topstories

 

[umair88]

It was a dimly lit corridor. Dirtied with empty food boxes and fallen hopes. Pigeons fluttering on the window sills, pecking on every decaying nibble they could find. The paint on the walls was rather the blood of the hospital’s year-end trail of patients. The flakes from the wall were falling off of them with no one to patch them up. Like the wounds on the arms and legs of patients waiting outside the medical wards.

It was a grave, odd world. A government hospital. A couple sitting on a sheet of cloth, with their child shivering and crying in the lap of his mother. Benches crawling with insects and the patients who could barely hold themselves. Whether someone sneezed, coughed or lost bladder control, he could only sit and wait.

Wait with the chimes of the wall-clock, the tick of the hour, for somebody to see them.

When it comes to the healthcare sector of Pakistan, we often neglect how one action can impact the lives of thousands. We might be able to understand the demands laid forward by the Young Doctor’s Association (YDA) to the government of Pakistan, but what about the lives of patients who are being neglected? YDA strike has left hundreds of patients distraught over the provision and availability of healthcare services continue reading: marham.pk/healthblog