48 graduate from Cuban universities
The inaugural group of 48 Cuban-trained Kenyan family physician specialists have now graduated after completing the two-year course.
Health Cabinet Secretary, Mutahi Kagwe said that Kenya is looking to borrow the medical administration course offered in Cuban universities, which lays emphasis on primary health care, premised on prevention rather than curative.
Kagwe said that the availability of healthcare professionals is a crucial element of universal healthcare.
“Whereas in the past we have had Cuban specialists come into the country to support, we witness the first of our own graduates from advanced training in Cuba. The graduation demonstrates the growth of this relationship between Kenya and Cuba,” said the CS when he presided over the graduation in a Nairobi hotel on Wednesday evening.
Big Four Agenda
“Training of the 48 Kenyans is a key part of the Big Four Transformative Agenda. It is one thing having facilities and it is another ensuring that when patients turn up, they can get seen by professionals such as those who have graduated,” he added.
He said the 48 doctors, who were selected by their counties, travelled to Cuba on September 28 and started off by learning Spanish while the family medicine course commenced in March 2019.
The CS said the doctors have had two years of basic training as well as 38 weeks of customized training to properly orient them to transfer their knowledge to the Kenyan context.
According to Kagwe, the Cuban healthcare system focuses on primary as opposed to secondary healthcare with family medicine programme at the core of it.
“The family physician and nurse programme provides for a team of a family physician and a nurse to offer this service. The physician is the first point of contact for all patients which ultimately improves the quality of care,” explained the CS.
He explained that the family medicine training in Cuba is aimed at preventing disease occurrence and their complications by seeking to identify modifiable risk factors.
“The country has placed emphasis on the availability of healthcare by ensuring that it has a sufficient number of healthcare professionals. But not just numbers for their own sake but numbers that are also oriented in such a way that prevention happens at the primary level,” said Kagwe.
Family medicine
He described the graduation as part of a deliberate plan to re-engineer the health workforce in the country to deliver better for Kenyans.
The CS urged the doctors to work closely with partners replicating the successes of health response in areas like HIV and malaria.
