The Kenya Clinical Officers Association (KCOA) has called for or concrete actions to address mental health concerns among health workers.
According to KCOA Secretary General Joseph Chebii the issue of mental health has now become a concern among health workers.
Speaking during the 24th Kenya clinical officers association annual scientific conference held at the Sai Roch hotel Mombasa, Chebii said many health workers go through stress due to poor working conditions, overworking due to shortage of health workers in health facilities and lack of resources.
"In the past three months we have buried four of our members from clinical medicine department. The issue of our colleagues taking their own lives through suicide has now become a major concern to us and it needs urgent and concrete action to address to it." said Chebii.
Adding " We have a problem with issues of mental illness and this one is attributed to many factors including work stress, alcoholism and drug abuse."
Chebii called on the government to come up with a special taskforce and policies to address the issue before it escalates further.
"We have been having an issue with the CBC and we saw the government forming a special taskforce to address it, we also want a taskforce be gazetted and address the issue of health workers. " charged Chebii.
His sentiments were echoed by KCA president Albert Taity who also emphasized on the need for more resources to be channeled to the health sector by both national and county governments.
"I think it is important to note that most of the counties have not been meeting the 15% of the budgetary allocation to health out of their resources according to the Abuja declaration. We want to also push the national government to devolve more resources to to the counties because health is now a devolved function." said Tiaty.
Adding" The other thing we also need to do is to think about the general welfare or our health workers. Health workers are the software of the system, even if you have the best gadget but poor software it can never work.
