The Council of Governors (CoG) and the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council (KMPDC) have engaged in a brawl over a directive that all ambulances and emergency medical attendants be registered before or by September 15.
KMPDC has instructed that ambulances, paramedics, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), operators, and other pre-hospital care services must register with the council or face penalties like being barred from operating.
Governors have complained, however, referring to the Ministry of Health and its agencies as ignoring agreed consultations with counties. CoG chairperson Ahmed Abdullahi clarified that the directive disempowers devolution and duplicates county responsibilities well-articulated in the Constitution.
In his September 9 letter to governors, Abdullahi instructed the counties to disregard the notice and noted that the ambulances’ services are vested in county governments by Article 186 and Part 2 of the Fourth Schedule.
“Counties have made significant investments in ambulances and built referral networks over the last 12 years. The KMPDC Act does not vest those functions in national agencies, and thus the impugned sanctions do not apply,” said Abdullahi.
County health authorities also feared that creating parallel systems would be wasteful and confusing.
They further noted that the counties had already, during a September 5 meeting in Mombasa, turned down KMPDC’s draft standards for emergency care, stating that any system will have to align with county-controlled ambulance dispatch systems.
“The Ministry of Health and its institutions have gone against resolutions calling for consultation and cooperation,” Abdullahi went on. “We therefore instruct counties to disregard the public notice and treat it with the contempt it is deserving of.”
