‘Thankless job’ – why trainee Kenyan doctors are taking their own lives

A sombre mood engulfed a village in Kenya’s Rift Valley last week as dozens of medical interns joined other mourners at the burial of their colleague who had taken his own life.
Speaker after speaker lamented the loss of Francis Njuki, a 29-year-old trainee pharmacist, whose family told the BBC about his feelings of exhaustion and frustration over the non-payment of his salary by the government since he started working as an intern in August.
He is the fifth medic to kill themselves in Kenya in the last two months because of “work-stress hardships and lack of responsive insurance cover”, according to Dr Davji Atellah, the secretary of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) – adding it was not something the union had ever recorded before.
There had also been five attempted suicides by KMPDU members this year, the medical body said.
No figures are yet available on the number of suicides nationwide in Kenya this year.
Njuki was doing his internship at a public hospital in Thika town near the capital, Nairobi, when he took his life last month.
He had reported hallucinations and depression due to sleep deprivation, his uncle Tirus Njuki told BBC.
“In his suicide note he mentioned that the four-month salary delay was among issues that aggravated his mental illness, pushing him to end his life,” the uncle added.
The first-born in his family, the intern had been battling depression and had been receiving treatment, according to a police report.
Njuki was among hundreds of interns who were posted to health facilities in August to do their mandatory one-year training to qualify.
But the interns say they had not received their salaries for the first four months, with the government citing financial constraints.
This is despite the fact that interns are a crucial part of the workforce in public hospitals – used by many Kenyans who cannot afford private medical insurance.
Trainees make up about 30% of doctors in the state health sector.
They do most of the work in public hospitals, but under close supervision. They are on call, sometimes for 36 hours, and provide most of the health services that patients need.
“Like many of his colleagues, Dr Njuki faced insurmountable challenges in meeting basic needs such as rent and utility bills,” KMPDU said in a statement.