- Nurses have been leaving the facility for greener pastures locally and abroad.
- Maternity has only 71 beds but the ward has some 200 mothers at any given time.
Image: FILE
Senators have come face-to-face with the harsh realities at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital in Nairobi.
Members of the Senate Health Committee were on a fact-finding mission at the Level 5 hospital following claims of negligence and laxity at the facility.
The facility attracted attention following the death of Maureen Anyango,28, on September 6 after giving birth to twins at the facility.
Her husband, Robert Omondi, claimed his wife bled profusely after delivering through a caesarian section.
At the maternity ward, legislators found one bed is shared by at least three mothers and their newborn babies.
Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital CEO Emma Mutio told senators led by the committee chair Jackson Mandago that the maternity has only 71 beds but the ward has some 200 mothers at any given time.
“We are happy that you have come to see for yourselves the kind of situation we are faced with even as people accuse us of laxity and negligence,” she said.
Mutio added that the hospital, besides having its facilities overstretched, is also faced with a shortage of staff, particularly nurses.
“If a nurse is seeing 50 mothers at the maternity and takes three minutes with every one of them, how long will it take for one to go around? That is our situation but people are accusing our nurses of taking too long before attending to patients,” she explained.
Jane Oyieko, who is in charge of finance at the hospital, noted that nurses have also been leaving for greener pastures locally or abroad.
“From January to now, 30 nurses have left for greener pastures. Since we are not the recruiting agency, we can't replace those who have left swiftly,” she said.
Oyieko noted that the hospital had prepared a budget of Sh220 million to effectively discharge services from September to the end of the year.
“We only got Sh60 million. That is what we got,” she told the lawmakers.
Mandago agreed with the hospital management that the facility is serving more people than it could handle.
“The facility is too small for the population it is serving. Even the infrastructure was not meant to serve the number of people seeking health services here,” he stated.
The hospital’s board chair Joe Aketch told the committee staff at the facility work in “very difficult circumstances.”
“I just want to reiterate that we are glad that you came. There is so much that is not known about Mama Lucy,” he said.
Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital’s reproductive health department has the third largest maternity in the country by workload, according to Mutio.
She noted that despite having only 71 beds, the facility had 2,770 deliveries (an average of 30 a day) between July and September 2022.
“This was only exceeded by Nakuru Referral Hospital at 2,954 deliveries with 250 beds and Pumwani Maternity Hospital at 4,780 deliveries with 354 beds,” Mutio told the committee.
Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital is a level-5 Hospital located between Umoja-II and Komarock estates in Nairobi, some 11 kilometres east of the city center at the junction of Kangundo Road and Kayole Spine Road. The area is mainly residential and has numerous informal settlements.