A sombre mood engulfed a village in Kenya’s Rift Valley last week as dozens of medical interns joined other mourners at the burial of their colleague who had taken his own life.
Speaker after speaker lamented the loss of Francis Njuki, a 29-year-old trainee pharmacist, whose family told the BBC about his feelings of exhaustion and frustration over the non-payment of his salary by the government since he started working as an intern in August.
He is the fifth medic to kill themselves in Kenya in the last two months because of “work-stress hardships and lack of responsive insurance cover”, according to Dr Davji Atellah, the secretary of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) – adding it was not something the union had ever recorded before.
There had also been five attempted suicides by KMPDU members this year, the medical body said.
'Thankless job' – why trainee Kenyan doctors are taking their own lives https://t.co/vc8gLRQQpg
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 16, 2024
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.