Kenyatta National Hospital and other hospital within Nairobi for the last two days their patients have been stranded in the hospital.
Since Friday the health facilities have not been able to access or make payments using NHIF system.
This is due to a major system outage in the National Hospital Insurance Fund systems (NHIF).
The system failure is believed to have been caused by the collapse of a faulty power transformer.
NHIF in a statement apologize to it’s members due to unavoidable circumstances caused by a power supply system at NHIF building in upper hill which affected the service delivery to it’s members.
“Our technical team are working to fix the problem and services will be restored and Patients will be able to access the service,” they said.
As of Saturday afternoon , patients were still stranded despite the NHIF promises to work on the problem as soon as possible.
The highest number of patients who were affected were those who had been admitted and they wanted to pay their hospital bills using NHIF cards before being discharged.But because NHIF system collapsed they have not.
Stephen Omondi a patient in one of the hospital said that he was suppose to be discharged two days ago and he wanted to clear his hospital bills using NHIF card but because of this issue he hasn’t.
The problem has not been fixed as of now and it’s still unclear when will be restored. Patients who had been discharged are now raising concerns for the rising bills because they were forced to stay at the hospital waiting for the NHIF systems to be restored.
A patient at Kenyatta National Hospital expressed his frustration to the NHIF and the hospital for poor communication on how the issue will be resolved.
Many Kenyans have took their anger on social media protesting over the failure and possible penalties they are going to be charged due to late payments as the outage affect also mobile service therefore monthly contribution can not be made.
