Remarks · 25 September 2023
Good morning;
This is a very special moment in the history of public service delivery in our country. For decades, success in relieving citizens of the huge burden of human suffering and financial distress caused by illness has been elusive. The main reason for this is that our health system devoted itself exclusively to the provision of curative services and primary healthcare and gave minimal attention to preventive and promotive health interventions that begin at home often before the onset of serious illness.
At the consultative stage of the process by which we formulated the Bottom Up Economic Transformation Agenda, Kenyans made it very clear to us that the transformation of our public healthcare model was long overdue. Despite appreciable progress in enhancing the availability of healthcare infrastructure, technology and personnel access to curative healthcare remained difficult and the costs so high that many thriving households have been plunged into serious financial trouble by the illness of a single family member. Thirty-six per cent of our citizens are at risk of being impoverished by the catastrophic financial burden of serious illness.
Kenyans, therefore, expressed their yearning for a new approach to healthcare, one that saved costs, simplified the means of actualising the fundamental constitutional right to the highest attainable standard of health set out in Article 43 (1) (a), and we met them directly at their point of need. We agreed that a community health approach is the foundation of preventive healthcare, mainly because 70 per cent of cases attended to in our hospitals are preventable. At the same time, every shilling invested in community health has a return of KSh9 saved in curative healthcare costs.
We committed, therefore, to employ community health promoters as a critical component of the national primary healthcare system in addition to employing 20,000 healthcare workers: Doctors, nurses, clinical officers, laboratory technologists, physiotherapists and others to bring the ratio of healthcare workers to the population to 23:10,000 as recommended by the World Health Organisation.
The case for primary healthcare underpinned by a wellresourced community health system at the very bottom is overwhelming. This is why our community health has received strong support from both levels of government, providing an opportunity to showcase a transformed approach to collaboration between the national and county governments.
Our journey to deliver these commitments is now well underway. Today, we strike out in a new direction to execute a paradigm shift in the way we serve the people of Kenya about their healthcare needs. Kenyans will now be attended to at their homes by fully-trained, home-grown community health promoters, who shall be supervised by qualified healthcare workers.
The community health promoters are facilitated to provide a defined package of preventive and promotive health services at the household level. Each promoter is mandated to serve 100 homes and will be provided with basic equipment for household health screening. 100,000 community health promoters kits will be provided by the national government through the Ministry of Health, together with smartphones to make them reachable and to enable them to transmit and receive necessary information, instruction and advice.
The national and county governments will co-share the responsibility for the remuneration in the form of stipends for the 100,000 community health promoters who will work in each of our 47 counties.
By launching the essential kits to equip community health promoters, we are making a bold statement of our intent to take a big step towards winning our nation’s long-standing struggle for freedom from disease using a bottom-up strategy. This is also our celebration of critical victories in this struggle: Victory for citizen well-being and freedom from disease, for devolution and collaboration between national and county governments, for the Bottom Up Economic Transformation Agenda and, most importantly, an immense victory for the people of Kenya.
Shortly, Kenyans will no longer need to travel to a health facility for basic screening and the treatment of minor ailments, as well as preventative and promotive healthcare. Instead, health facilities in the form of these kits, and the community healthcare workers who shall operate them, shall go to Kenyans and serve them at their homes. This is the essence of a bottom-up transformation of citizen service.
I urge community health promoters and healthcare workers to serve Kenyans with zeal and motivation and to be compassionate, respectful, gentle and thoroughly professional. I urge them to remain focused on helping our nation win the struggle for freedom from disease.
I also take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the patriotism of our county governors, whose dedication to this partnership has been exemplary. With this spirit of collaboration between the two levels of governance, the sky is the limit for Kenya.
It is now my pleasure to launch the nationwide exercise to distribute 100,000 community health promoter kits to all 47 county governments for further deployment. Thank you. God bless you. God bless Kenya.