My Country Health Structure

Have you ever wondered. With the devolution, how the structure of health is at the moment.

The Ministry of Health has its
headquarters at Afya house in
Nairobi

August 2010, Kenya conducted a

national referendum that ushered in
a new constitution. The new
constitution introduced a new
governance framework with a
national government and 47
counties. This has been termed as
decentralization or devolution. This
was a marked shift from the highly
centralized form of government that
had been in place since
independence in 1963. The
centralized governance was plagued
by political and economic dis-
empowerment and unequal
distribution of resources.
The term ‘decentralization’ is
used to describe a wide variety
of power transfer arrangements
and accountability systems.
Policies range from the transfer
of limited powers to lower
management levels within
current health management
structures and financing
mechanisms to extensive
sectoral reform efforts, which
reconfigure the provision of
even the most basic services.
In the first case,
decentralization may later
become the driving force for
health sector reform; in the
latter, it is driven by the wider
sectoral reform efforts. The
parameters for decentralization
-- the speed, the pressures,
and the scope of issues to
consider -- vary considerably.

In the Kenya context, the
expectation is that a devolved health
system will lead to improvement in
efficiency of service delivery,
stimulate innovation in the wider
sector, improve access to and
equity of available services, and
promote accountability and
transparency in service delivery.

A majority of Kenya’s population
receives healthcare services from
the public sector.

The range of
services include preventive,
promotive, curative and
rehabilitative.

Preventive services
include routine childhood
immunizations and environmental
activities to control mosquito
breeding which in turn reduce
malaria transmission.

Promotive
services are mostly educational
services provided to the general
population on healthy lifestyles and
available interventions.

Curative and
rehabilitative services include all
treatment activities available at
hospitals and other healthcare
facilities.

To achieve these functions, the
Kenya government has traditionally
run a network of healthcare facilities
staffed by government employees
and run directly by the budgets
allocated by the government from
public resources. Under the
centralized system, all healthcare
facilities were organized into 6
levels as follows:

1 Community
Units Community
2 Dispensary Village Level
3 Health
Centre
Locational
Level
4 District
Hospital
District
Headquarters
5 Provincial
Hospital Provincial
Headquarters
6 National
Hospital Capital City

(source wikipedia)