Kenfrey is a pharmacist at the Loitokitok Sub-County Hospital, Kenya which is situated in a rural town on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He has been positioned here since 2013, after completion of his bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from the University of Nairobi.
Loitokitok, is a Level IV hospital, serving a radius of 100 km which means that most patients (especially from the nearby nomadic communities) who visit don’t have other choices. Whenever a prescribed drug is not available, the patient goes without medicine, no matter how good the rest of the services are, meaning the service cycle remains incomplete. Fortunately, the Ministry of Health began the shift from a PUSH supply system to a PULL system. Kenfrey, thus found himself responsible for ordering and managing medicines for the hospital, health centres and dispensaries in the area. He got trained and later became a Master Trainer on health commodity management. He took part in medicine distribution campaigns such as trachoma eradication and supported supervision visits facilitated by the county government for on-the-job training to rural health facility staff comprised mostly of nurses. These activities caused his love for supply chain to grow.
According to Kenfrey, one of the challenges facing his county is a huge skills gap which he wishes to resolve through training and transfer of skills. The current academic curricula focus more on clinicals and less on technical aspects such as supply chain. He also believes that the current manual Logistics Management Information System is labour intensive and must be digitalised to increase efficiency of the processes.
He believes that the Bee Skilled Hive is an ace up his sleeve where he has access to valuable skills and networks of professionals from other countries. The supply chain course that he has completed bridges the gap between academia and the working environment. One interesting thing about Kenfrey is that most people expect a towering stature from his voice (usually phone conversations). It is hard to appreciate his amazing sense of humour before he has spoken, he says.
