254 Embu County health workers employed on contract under the Universal Health Care Programme four years ago now want the county and national governments to tell them what will happen when their contracts expire in May.
The National Government first employed the workers on a one-year contract during the outbreak of COVID-19 while the county government later extended their service with another three-year contract ending in July.
The National Chair of the Kenya National Union of Nurses, Joseph Ngwasi, speaking at the Embu Level 5 hospital said it was important that the two levels of government determine who’ll take responsibility for the workers once their contracts run out.
“These are people with families and they need the information early enough so they can plan their lives,” Ngwasi said.
The Chair of the Embu Branch of the Clinical Officers’ Union Alloys Njoka said the workers who comprise of nurses, clinical officers and hospital records managers were a huge part of the health workforce in the county and exiting the service would leave most health facilities without critical staff.
Njoka added that the Embu county government also needed to urgently address itself the problem of people doing the same job earning different salaries because their employment terms were different.
“For example, we have some people in Job Group H earning Ksh 97,000, others Ksh 50,000, others Ksh 35,000 and others Ksh 17,000”, Njoka said.
