City hospital detains teen’s body for seven months over Sh2m bill
The Nairobi Women’s Hospital is holding the body of a teenager, seven months after her death, due to pending bills, another case of perceived hospital cruelty versus an impoverished population that views healthcare as a right rather than a service to be paid for.
Beretta Reri, who was an orphan, will not be laid to rest unless her family pays Sh2.6 million to the hospital.
Her grandmother Ms Caren Achieng’ said that she has done all in her power to raise the money but to no avail.
Ms Achieng’, a single mother who lives with her two grown-up daughters and six grandchildren in Rongai, says she has done all in her power to raise the money “including getting a pay bill number to beg and I only got Sh20,000.”
KIDNEY FAILURE
The hospital did not reveal the cause of the girl’s death but the grandmother said that she experienced kidney failure and had to be transferred from the hospital’s Rongai branch to Adam’s Arcade for intensive care.
“She seemed like she was improving then her speech became slurred and she died,” her grandmother says.
Beretta died in February 2016 and her family has not been able to bury her due to their inability to raise the hospital bill.
Her grandmother says her other daughter, a mother of five children, washes clothes in the neighbourhood.
The elderly woman says that she took in the late teen in 2005 when her daughter, who was Beretta’s mother, died of throat cancer.
Ms Achieng’ says that she would like to bury her granddaughter because of the relationship she shared with her.
“She would write [to] me little letters every morning before she left for school. The letters would be longer when she was apologising for something she did wrong”, she says amidst tears.
Johnson Mwithi, Nairobi Women’s Hospital’s Chief Officer of Business Development said the hospital reviews each of their debtors on their own merit.
BAD DEBT
If it is established that the debtor (patient), their family or other interested stakeholders are unable to pay, then such debts are classified as a bad debt and a report is prepared recommending that the debt be written off.
Mr Mwithi said that in Beretta’s case, the hospital has been “handling several stakeholders who have been exploring different ways of offsetting the bill and are not at that point of declaring this a bad debt”.
Notably, the hospital has waived Sh500,000 as well as all the mortuary fees to date.
But Mr Mwithi did not explain how long the exploration would take and why the hospital is apparently convinced that Achieng’— a tailor living in a cramped one-bedroomed house in Rongai with more than six dependants — could not qualify for a debt waiver.
