Lead image for Public hospitals empty, KNH overflowing as clinical officers' strike drags on.
Forty-three days into the Kenya Union of Clinical Officers (Kuco) strike, the country's public health system has split into two realities: abandoned county wards on one side, and a handful of overwhelmed referral hospitals absorbing the overflow on the other.
At Kenyatta National Hospital's (KNH) outpatient wing, the benches are packed with patients who have travelled from counties where the nearest clinic has gone dark. They are not there because KNH is where they would ordinarily seek care, but because it is the only place left with staff to see them.
Elsewhere in the country, the opposite scene plays out: locked consultation rooms, silent maternity wings, and diagnostic machines gathering dust in county facilities with no one left to run them.
The strike began at midnight on July 20, 2026, and has paralysed outpatient clinics, maternity units and diagnostic services in all 47 counties. Its impact has been compounded by a simultaneous nationwide nurses' strike, leaving public hospital wards across the country largely deserted. Patients who cannot afford private care, or who cannot find a bed in private facilities already buckling under the overflow, have been left to fend for themselves.
"Clinical officers cover most of the outpatients all the way from level 2 to level 6 facilities. We cover most of the specialised services. If you are to go to surgery and have anaesthesia before the surgery is performed, you have a 98 per cent chance that the person administering it is a clinical officer. If you have a problem with your eyes, around 96 per cent of people you are going to see are clinical officers," Peterson Wachira, chairperson of Kuco, told Nation.
" When we started the strike, the nurses were still there, so patients could find nurses and services. Now, only the doctors are there. So, Kenyans are suffering. What is bothering us is that the CoG seems unbothered. There doesn't seem to be urgency anywhere," said Wachira.
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Union leaders are demanding that officials honour agreements the government has already signed off on. Chief among the sticking points is that the Health Cabinet Secretary, the Public Service Board CEO and the Chief Officer of Health Services have yet to formally sign and deposit the negotiated 2025–2029 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, the final procedural step needed to make it enforceable.