IF YOU WERE TO COLLAPSE SUDDENLY, WHO SHOULD YOU CALL?

While travelling in the country side,away from the big towns, have you ever thought of what exactly would happen if you were to get involved in a road traffic accident.

That no matter how educated you are or how connected you may be, your fate is in the hands of the good samaritan who happens to be passing by?

That no matter your insuarance cover or how wealthy you may be, your fate is in the hands of the nearby government dispensary?

This shows a fundamental truth about not just emergency critical health care in general. Your life and health is only as safe as that of the least equipped hospital and the poorest in the society. It is determined by the height of the floor and not by the ceiling.

As things stand, article 7 of the health act of 2017 makes it so even that even the most advanced private hospitals cannot deny anyone emergency care.

But what care can be provided in small ,understaffed and poorly equipped rural clinics? What care can be provided when the important life saving drugs such as donated blood and oxygen are absent outside large towns?

This is why we need a Universal Health program with quality emergency critical health care as one of its pillars. To achieve it, we need

1. National requirement guidelines around personnel ,equipment and drugs. That no matter which hospital you are in a well equipped motivated team should meet you with all necessary emergency drugs available. Private facilities would have to comply and county governments should be supported with the special budget allocations to achieve this goal.
2. National emergency treatment protocols based on the best science available. This would be to ensure high quality of care throughout the country.
3. Co-ordinated emergency response teams comprised of ambulances and paramedic teams in every county. As long as every geographical area is covered by wananchi know how to get into teams ,a lot of lives would be saved.

The benefits of every single Kenyan of such a program would be many. A co-ordinated universal emergency care program would be the infrastructure upon which other problems will be solved too. Pregnant women in labour, heart attack patients in their houses ,criminal gangs related injuries, mass casualty events such as collapsed buildings or terrorist attacks to name just but a few.

If such were the things that we were investing billions into every year and not just overhead highways and hanging railways ,there are many lives we would not have lost and many more that will preserve.

Think about the next time you are travelling across the country side .

254 Hope.