Kisumu — The Kenya National Union of Nurses and Midwives (KNUNM) have asked health facilities to ensure they have enough beds for effective quality services.
The Unionists supported the call by Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale to health facilities to stop charging patients sharing beds.
The Kenya National Union of Nurses (KNUN) Secretary General Seth Panyako says facilities have deprived the public of funds while falsifying their bed capacities.
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"I want to assure the CS that we are together to ensure the facilities provide beds to our clients," he said.
Panyako says there is no way to charge patients while they are lumped up in one bed.
He told the facilities who are eager to have more patients to be ready to have enough beds, employ more health personnel to be able to offer quality services.
Speaking to the press at the start of a conference in Kisumu on capacity building in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations for KNUNM officials, drawn from the 47 counties, Panyako says cartels have used the loop hole for far too long to steal from Kenyans.
"This scheme was used during the defunct National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) and they want to keep it in the Social Health Authority (SHA)," he said.
Collins Ajwang, the President of the National Nurses Association of Kenya (NNAK) says the government must ensure there are enough facilities for quality deliverance of health services.
Ajwang says standards must be maintained in the facilities and it should be the work of the government.
"You find one nurse manning a whole facility, one nurse is managing a whole department in our tertiary hospitals, it should not be like that," he said.
Joseph Kwasi, KNUN Chairman says the training is aimed at equipping the union officials with skills on how best to address disputes in the counties.
"We are enhancing their knowledge on matters of resolution on labor matters," he said.
From the training, Kwasi says the union officials will have better ways to negotiate with the employers to avert strikes that always paralyses health services across the country putting the lives of Kenyans at risk.
"We don't want on and off industrial disharmony, where we fail to come to an agreement between the employer and the union," he said.
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