The Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) has apologised to the public after chaos erupted, with frustrated patients storming Afya House, the Ministry of Health headquarters, over failures of the Social Health Authority (SHA) system.
In a heartfelt statement, KNH CEO Dr Evanson Kamuri acknowledged the inconvenience caused and reassured Kenyans that the issue has been fully resolved.
Also, the CEO asks Kenyans affected by the SHA hiccups to exercise patience even as they seek to be admitted or to be discharged, terming the 2-day outage as a normal thing that happens in tech.
KNH CEO Evanson Kamuri during a past media presser. Photo: The Star Source: Facebook
“We deeply regret the disruption and frustration this has caused to our patients and their families.
“The Social Health Authority (SHA) system is now fully operational, and services at KNH have resumed as normal,” he said.
The downtime had left patients unable to access critical services, forcing some to wander between hospital and SHA offices in vain.
The frustration boiled over when a group of patients stormed Afya House, demanding accountability and immediate action to fix the failing system.
KNH has since taken swift steps to address the backlog caused by the outage.
Dr Kamuri noted, “We’ve deployed additional staff across all affected departments and extended working hours to ensure that every pending case is resolved quickly.
Our commitment is to provide uninterrupted, quality healthcare services.”
For many patients, the rollout of the SHA system, intended to simplify access to healthcare, has been anything but smooth.
Complaints about delays and inefficiencies have been mounting, with some questioning whether the system was ready for implementation.
KNH has assured Kenyans that lessons have been learned and steps taken to ensure such incidents don’t happen again.
“We’re working closely with SHA to build a system that meets the needs of our patients without disruptions,” Dr Kamuri said.
While normalcy has returned, the incident serves as a wake-up call for improvements in Kenya’s healthcare systems to better serve the public.
