Kenya’s Ministry of Health recently launched the first-ever Kenya Emergency Medical Care (EMC) Program, and inaugurated a multi-disciplinary national steering committee tasked with implementing the program to provide quality emergency care and strengthen seamless coordination to save lives.
Key strategic objectives & notable expected outcomes:
- Establish an integrated national and county infrastructure to support access to emergency services through the creation of a country-wide, toll-free emergency access number, standardized ambulance services and compliance standards for emergency departments
- Enhance delivery of quality services through capacity building, strengthening response for a mass casualty incident and provision of emergency health products and technologies
- Provide mechanisms for financing emergency medical care through resource mobilization initiatives that promote sustainability and through the establishment of an emergency medical treatment fund
- Develop a workforce development licensure framework for pre-hospital care personnel, complete with a standardized curriculum endorsed and approved by the Ministry of Health
- Strengthen systems for monitoring, evaluation, surveillance and research to improve decision making and assessment reporting
- Provide leadership and governance oversight, review of legislative documents and assess mid-term/end-term progress on key strategies
Key success indicators of the program:
- Establishment of functional 24 hour national and county emergency operation centers and ambulance dispatch centers
- Creation of a single toll-free short code emergency number
- Revised ambulance and emergency department standards — with 100% compliance of ambulances by year 2 and 100% compliance of emergency departments by year 3
- Creation of national standard operating procedures for ambulances — with 100% compliance by year 2
- Creation of emergency medical care treatment guidelines — with 100% compliance by year 2
- Establish no stockout of key emergency medical commodities at public health facilities by year 2
- Incremental resource mobilization mechanisms to finance EMC over a 5 year
- Creation of a service scheme for prehospital care practitioners by year 1
- Incremental increase in the number of licensed prehospital care practitioners — from 1,000 in year 1 to 5,000 in year 5
- Annual review and planning of emergency medical treatment guidelines
- Compliance with 75% of EMC activities in the EMC policy — by all counties in year 5
The estimated funding for the EMC strategy is Ksh. 11.7 B over a 5 year period with the Ministry of Health taking a lead role in coordinating the various implementation partners drawn from the government, non-state actors as well as development partners.