Quality home-based care for the aged and the chronically sick: an update from Amanihoiva Kenya’s training programme launch event

With the large disparity in economic status of Kenyans, quality healthcare is left to those with means which sometimes leads to worsening of existing conditions and sometimes mortality.

It’s based on the above that AmaniHoiva Kotihoito Oy, a privately owned Finnish company with a Kenyan subsidiary – AmaniHoiva Kenya Ltd, under the leadership of the CEO, Faisa Egge, saw an opportunity to bridge the gap in access to affordable homebased care for the elderly and chronically sick through use of qualified Health Care Assistants (HCA) in Kenya. This is to be achieved through setting up a diagnostic center in Nairobi City, as the nerve of their operations, that would later be cascaded to other cities and towns in the country through the aid of technology assisted doctor assistance. With Business Partnership Support from Finnpartnership, AmaniHoiva, in collaboration with key stakeholders, reviewed and enhanced the current curricula in training nurse aids in different colleges in Kenya and has developed a curriculum in Health Care Assistance. The training programme was officially launched on 22^nd November, 2022 and the first cohort of trainees consists of 50 local students.

This training, which is a one-year programme, is sponsored by AmaniHoiva, who will also employ majority of the grandaunts to work in the diagnostic center to be established in Nairobi. AmaniHoiva has partnered with Maasai Mara University to train the students with some units being taught by lecturers from Finland to bring in International best practices to the training. The County Government of Narok through its Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education are also partners in the training through provision and access to healthcare facilities to be used in training and also input in curriculum development and approval.

Health Care Assistant training will take a pilot of one ward in Narok county and evaluate the outcome after one year of the programme. This will form a basis of future partnership currently under talks to train more HCAs for a period of 3 to four years under a consortium and include more wards and possibly extend the programme to other counties. This will help in assisting more people at the community level access affordable and quality health care in the confines of their homes, therefore assisting the government in achievement of the universal healthcare agenda. It will also help in decongesting health facilities of cases that can be easily dealt with at home therefore freeing bed spaces for the cases that critically need them.