Francis Muli
The Nairobi Hospital management has fired over 200 staffers days after announcing a restructuring move aimed at cutting costs.
Some of the staffers, Kahawa Tungu understands, were implicated in a graft audit conducted against the Hospital.
“Besides the staff affected by normal rationalisation, the hospital is disengaging with all staff who have perennial performance issues or were implicated in unethical practices during forensic audits of the hospital’s operations,” said Nairobi Hospital in a statement.
“It is important to note that while our structure will have less staff in some categories, such as support services, more staff will be engaged in core clinical and nursing services to achieve an optimal balance between the skills and demand from our patients.”
This comes at a time the hospital is recording dwindling fortunes attributed to high operating costs. For instance, the hospital in 2019 spent Ksh1.37 billion on salaries and wages, while recording a Ksh824.6 million loss as compared to a Ksh900.4 profit in 2018.
Read: Nairobi Hospital Threatens To Sack Staffers For Leaking Information About Planned Retrenchment
“The reasoning behind the latest retrenchment is to increase the number of staff in the Clinical and Nursing divisions and reducing staff in the non-clinical departments,” said a board member as quoted by Business Daily.
The retrenchments were first announced by CEO James Nyamongo in a memo dated March 24, 2021. Nyamongo claimed that the hospital was increasing the number of key staff in the Clinical and Nursing divisions and reducing staff in the non-clinical departments.
“In response to the emerging business environment, the Board of Management has approved a new organization structure that is focused on our core areas of the business. We are embarking on a restructuring aimed at achieving a balance in our skills needs, based on the demand of our clients. This will entail increasing the number of key staff in the Clinical and Nursing divisions and reducing staff in the non-clinical departments,” said Nyamongo in the memo dated March 25.
Nairobi Hospital also blamed the restructuring on a reduced number of people visiting the hospital due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has further shrunk the revenue flows.
“The key criterion to be used in the identification of staff affected in this process will be their fit in the revised organisation structures, based on their skills and experience, standard of work performance, displayed work initiative and respective competencies defined for the different roles in the organisation design. The exercise, scheduled to be completed in May 2021, will cover both unionisable and non-unionisable staff cadres,” said Nyamongo.
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