"Nairobi is a Malaria Free Zone"

(<-- Bahati Clinic)
One of the clinics that was visited by the University of Nairobi students a few months during the first phase of need finding was Bahati Clinic.

Today, we visited Bahati Clinic in hopes of talking to the head pharmacist. Unfortunately, she was not there and we had to wait around for about one and a half hours in order to talk to the doctor.

Bahati Clinic is considered as a level 4 in the range of health care facilities that goes up to level 6. According to the doctor at Bahati, the level 6 health care facility in Kenya is Kenyatta National Hospital. Bahati Clinic is a facility sponsored by the government. A patient only pays 20shillings which is about 25cents. This allows the patient to be seen by the doctor and also provides for free medication.

At Bahati, we were interested in finding out whether the pharmacy experiences stock outs of key drugs for Malaria. We were met with an interesting phrase from the doctor; "Nairobi is a Malaria free zone." He also would not elaborate upon whether the pharmacy always had enough medications for all patients and how often the supplies were stocked.

Joe and I came away feeling that there was some sort of apprehension here on the part of the doctor in divulging information or expressing any unhappiness with the way the government was working with Bahati. In terms of whether the clinic ever ran out of medication, the answer was that "we may not always have every medication but we have the essentials." Answers like this and this sort of allusiveness has been common place since we started about a week ago. The pharmacy and drug question is proving to be a sensitive one indeed.