Biomedical engineers has protested a resolution by the Council of Governors not to renew the Managed Equipment Scheme, saying it will lead to loss of billions of shillings of taxpayers’ money.

They said the medical equipment came in handy at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and that the project saved many Kenyans lives.

Speaking to journalists in Nairobi yesterday afternoon, the Association of Medical Engineering of Kenya (AMEK) said the resolution was ill-timed. They said the decision will expose Kenyans to serious health risks.

“It is ill-advised that a project which has benefitted close to seven million Kenyans since its inception is not something that should be done away with,” Millicent Alooh, AMEK’s secretary general said at a city hotel.

The project, Alooh said,  saw an estimated 6,827,324 patients benefit from the MES project by May 2021 which was captured in a report by the Ministry of Health, and copied to the CoG.

 “The system reliability of the MES equipment has been more than 95 per cent which is the World Health Organisation standard uptime requirement for medical equipment in the hospitals,” she said.

This, Alooh said, is a demonstration the equipment has a longer lifespan to be used through modern technology maintenance and by increasing human capacity in hospitals to offer the required technical services.

The project, which kicked off on a controversial note with some counties refusing to adopt it, involved establishing 219 fully-equipped theatres in 115 hospitals; 120 sterilisation equipment and surgical sets in 118 hospitals, fully equipped dialysis centres with a total of 305 dialysis stations in 54 hospitals, and a fully equipped ICU with a total of 88 ICU and 44 HDU beds in 14 health facilities among others.