It’s bad enough when you have a sick person around you and it becomes even devastating when you know that Kenyatta National Hospital is all that you have to contend with.

Other than being known as the largest referral hospital in East and Central Africa, KNH has for the longest time been famous for all the wrong ailments; a crippling lack of medical staff, patient’s dying due to negligence, too much congestion that sometimes patients are forced to share beds and at the very worst the agony cancer patients have to contend with when the only two radiology machines in the facility fail.

What is even more disturbing is the reality that now the challenges will not be only issues that most families with patients at the facility will have to worry about going by the series of terrifying incidents that are being reported in the corridors of Kenyatta hospital. The safety of patients is no longer guaranteed.

CANCER PATIENT BRUTALLY MURDERED IN KNH

On Sunday, the nation woke up to horrifying news of a cancer patient who was killed inside a ward at the Kenyatta National Hospital where he was recovering.

Mr Cosmas Kenyatta Mutunga, 42, had been admitted at the hospital’s Ward 8C but was found dead at about 5am on Sunday. He had stab wounds and one of his eyes had been gouged out. Blood was splattered on the walls and the floor of the ward he was sharing with a patient who has both hearing and speech impairment.

Details have also emerged that the deceased, Mr Cosmas Mutunga, 42, had land related issues at his rural home but that’s besides the issue that this article aims to address.

SPARE AS THE “ISOLATED CASE” CRAP MS LILY KOROS

KNH Chief Executive Officer Lily Koros said yesterday that the matter is under investigation adding that it was an isolated case.

“We wish to reiterate that this is an isolated incident. We shall facilitate timely investigations. We wish to assure patients and the public that the hospital is safe and there is no cause for panic,” she said.

Isolated incidence! Really Ms Lily! So you are blatantly going to pull out that old cliché crisis management jargon. I know they say that Kenyans forget issues way too fast, that as soon as a crisis is overtaken by another attention shifts to the next one but no; the truth is that we just don’t forget, the issues are just way too overwhelming for us to keep up.

KNH DIALYSIS PATIENT FOUND DEAD BY ROADSIDE

Madam Lily, is it not just in December last year coincidentally, when 24 year old Wilfred Weke, who had been admitted to your facility for a dialysis procedure but was found dead nearly a kilometer from the hospital.

According to Weke’s family, he was too weak to move out of his ward let alone walk a long distance outside the hospital. One year down the line; the family has heard nothing with regards to “investigations” surrounding the case.

NURSE RAPES PATIENT

Should I also remind you of yet another isolated case madam Lily of the patient, Ms Philis Nyaguthi, 28, who was raped in KNH allegedly by a nurse in June 2013?

The suspect was released on bond who was later discharged for lack of evidence to warrant criminal liability against him. Ms Philis Nyaguthii, 28, unfortunately died weeks later.

That they are security flaws at Kenyatta National Hospital is no longer debatable and the management together with the ministry of health ought to have addressed this lapse instead of burying their heads in the sand until the next crisis when they shamelessly give us that “isolated case” crap.

Both the staff and patients are vulnerable to security failures but the later are twice as vulnerable due to their physical condition and for a country that has bore the brunt of terror, a facility like KNH is not one that we cannot afford to overlook on matters security. It’s bad enough when access to medical healthcare is not guaranteed and even worse when security is not guaranteed as well.