Kenya to Start Offering Post Graduate Kidney Care Training

Kidney specialists in the country who currently get their Master’s degree programmes in the US, UK and South Africa will from September this year start receiving the same training in Kenya, from the University of Nairobi college of health science campus.

Former head of renal unit at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) Antony Were said that the country has a number of experts who can be in a position to equip the specialists with the required skills instead of them having to go to the foreign countries.

This programme is intended to produce Kidney specialists (nephrologists), kidney surgeons (urologists, and renal nurses. They will at the end of the training have become professionals who will be handling special medical care in Public hospitals.

This move was taken as a way of reducing the big number of patients with different kidney problems who flock the public hospitals for treatment but due to shortage on the number of specialists, most of them are not attended for at the right time.

Apart from shortage of specialists, the public hospitals have been lacking the required equipment for screening some of these diseases, thus forcing patients from different parts of the country to visit the KNH as it is the only public hospital with the equipment.

These patients, some from poor backgrounds have to visit KNH because it is affordable and the private hospitals, where they have the facilities tend to be very expensive. Over 8,000 kidney patients visit KNH for their dialysis sessions that costs Sh.5,000 per session while the same goes for Sh.7,500 to Sh.9,000 in private hospitals.

The classes have been planned in that each category, that is, nephrologists, urologists and renal nurses will be having ten students, but the number is expected to grow as time goes by. A research showed that the whole country has only 23 nephrologists in the public sector, who have to attend to the millions of Kenyans who visit the public hospitals on a daily basis.

Article by Vera Shawiza.