If you are looking for a health facility that provides a wellness package for the elderly, look no further than the M.P Shah Hospital.
For Sh 10,000, the hospital provides a Senior Citizen Package under which anyone above 55 years gets five critical health tests as the hospital steps up geriatric care in Kenya.
Introduced in the last quarter of 2020, the package helps the elderly determine their bone mineral density, dieting options to prevent lifestyle diseases, liver function capabilities, and cancer screening services. The package also includes physiotherapy services.
MP Shah Hospital Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr. Toseef Din says this package seeks to reduce the disease burden in “the most vulnerable” members of the society – the elderly.
She explains the package is not a marketing stunt by the hospital but a health plan that promotes early disease diagnosis.
The CEO gave an animated explanation: “The elderly constitute about 6% of the entire population in Kenya. Most of them are stacked in the rural areas, generally under the care of their children. However, health facilities in the rural areas are the least-prepared in providing care for the elderly.”
Dr. Din further adds older people live with increased risk of degenerative disease and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Most of the older people grapple with old age poverty and inaccessible health care.
“They mostly rely on their children working in urban areas. To make it worse, there is no robust health system providing long-term care for older people. Most don’t have health insurance nor good care at the family and community levels,” she quips.
According to the 2015-16 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey, over 37 per cent of households with older persons in Kenya live in poverty.
The data shows 70 percent of of poor households in Turkana, Mandera, Garissa, and Samburu counties have older persons. On the other side, Tharaka-Nithi, Nyeri, and Nairobi counties have the lowest proportion of poor households with older persons at less than 20 percent each.
The population of the older persons in Kenya has exponentially grown over the past two decades according to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). The population of older persons stood at about 1 million in 1989, 1.9 million in 2009 and reached 2.7 million in 2019.
According to the 2020 Policy Brief on COVID-19 and Older Persons, a majority of Kenya’s older persons are female (55%) and live in the rural areas. “Seven counties in Kenya have over 100,000 older persons each. These are Kakamega, Kiambu, Meru, Muranga, Machakos, Nakuru, and Nairobi.
Kakamega County has the highest number of older persons at over 128,000. About 60 percent of Kenya’s older persons are married and over one-third are widowed,” reads the report.
Dr. Toseef Din believes the introduction of the wellness package targeting older persons plugs into Kenya’s plan to achieve Universal Health Coverage by 2022.
By providing “this affordable and convenient wellness package, M.P Shah Hospital is accelerating the adoption of primary health care, particularly preventive approaches to NCDs”, says Din. Geriatric medicine, specialized health care for older persons, is not entrenched in Kenya.
This makes the country ill prepared to provide long-term care for older people. Without comprehensive health plans targeting older persons, this demographic remains exposed to high costs of healthcare. “This is the gap we are here to fill,” Dr. Din told Health Business Magazine.
“We want it to be normal for people to take their parents to hospital for health checkups. M.P Shah is reinvigorating the practice of geriatric care by aligning it with the UHC agenda.” Dr. Din further says the Seniour Citizens Package introduces a health plan that “provides quality preventive, curative, and promotive healthcare for older adults at low cost.”
According to Dr. Din, the package has received “good uptake.” She hopes with this health plan, M.P Shah Hospital, a member of the Social Service League, will enable older persons lead independent lives free of preventable diseases.
