The call by the leadership of the Seventh Day Adventist church that Kenyans should seek medical attention at home first and reduce hospital visits abroad, needs to be amplified.

Whereas the quality of medicare locally is often wanting, and hospitals abroad have better services, Kenyans must not give up on local facilities.

First, it is important they demand better services. By so doing, they will compel local hospitals to raise standards so they can be more competitive compared to those abroad.

Second, there is a need to encourage both the government and private investors to increase investments in specialised treatment and equipment so that the unique services Kenyans seek abroad can be made available locally.

This can be achieved, in part, through collaborations with either manufacturers of such equipment or hospitals that have advanced to the level where they can share expertise with smaller, emerging hospitals locally.

Already, there is a large pool of qualified medical personnel, including the hundreds of young doctors and health workers who, according to media reports, are trained but are yet to get jobs in either public or private sectors. That means there is sufficient manpower to ramp up health services.

Local hospitals should also borrow a leaf from their counterparts in advanced economies such as the US where health professionals are paid by the hour, rather than standard monthly incomes.

This encourages medics to put in measurable work for which they are adequately compensated.

As it is now, health professionals can clock-in to their work stations yet not attend to patients.

The other thing hospitals ought to do is increase linkages with insurance companies to get more Kenyans to sign up for health insurance and, also, reduce fraud, over-billing and extraneous tests.

Some hospital managers are often hell-bend on exhausting medical cover allocations of patients. As such, instead of focusing on treating the conditions that patients present, they prescribe a wide range of unnecessary tests that gobble up valuable resources.

Going forward, it will be necessary to institute far-reaching reforms in the sub-sector.  This will not only make local health centres competitive but also people-centred, which will in turn reduce medical tourism.