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Kenya is engaging other Nations with a shortage of healthcare service providers to recruit from the East African nationl.

Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe yesterday revealed that Kenya was already holding talks with Saudi Arabia and UK governments, which have expressed interest to employ Kenyan trained medical personnel.

“We are doing this due to the excess staff that we have. It is not that we want to send Kenyans overseas and deny ourselves the care they provide. We are doing this because of our advanced training and surplus,” he said.

He was speaking at Kenyatta University Teaching and Referral Hospital where he met 50 health workers who had just returned to the country after a mission in Seychelles.

Kagwe said sending Kenyan trained medical staff overseas was a way of raising its service provision rating to global standards.

“We want to ensure that our people are among the best on earth so that we do not rate ourselves just on the basis of what we see in Kenya, but globallyd,” he said.

In the new development, Kagwe reiterated that Kenya will also be projecting growth in its health tourism sector.

“Because of the developments we are witnessing in our hospitals across the country, we believe that we are going to develop medical tourism and it is important that we create the confidence among those who will come to Kenya that our workers are capable of working from anywhere in the world,” he added.

The Ministry of Labour, he said, is already working on modalities of making the employment of workers between local and overseas governments a formal policy; a move that he noted will help Kenyans employed abroad escape the abuse that is meted on them in various countries.