A Five-Year Blueprint to Transform Kenya’s Health Workforce and Strengthen Public Healthcare
NAIROBI: November 28, 2025
[Download link at end of article]
KMPDU today launched its Strategic Plan 2025–2029, a landmark blueprint that sets the direction for health workforce governance, patient care standards, and system-wide reforms over the next five years. The launch comes at a moment when the Government of Kenya, through the Principal Secretary for Medical Services, Dr. Ouma Oluga, has publicly reiterated its commitment to rebuilding a strong, motivated, and well-supported health workforce as the backbone of Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
Speaking at the launch, PS Oluga emphasized that Kenya cannot achieve UHC without investing in the welfare, deployment, and development of healthcare workers, noting that “health workers are at the centre of service delivery and must be supported for the system to function.” His remarks underscore a renewed national focus on addressing staffing gaps, workforce distribution, and essential incentives needed to retain skilled professionals.
Against this backdrop, KMPDU’s Strategic Plan presents an unflinching assessment of the country’s health system, the structural weaknesses, resource leakages, stalled reforms, and chronic underinvestment that continue to undermine healthcare delivery. It is an evidence-driven document that links doctors’ welfare directly to patient outcomes, insisting that no health system can serve its people when its workers are demoralized, underpaid, or unsupported.
A Plan Driven by Evidence, Values, and Lived Realities
The Strategic Plan is anchored on foundations drawn directly from the health system’s reality:
The urgent need to strengthen health workforce governance and professional regulation
The centrality of doctors’ welfare – pay, safety, career progression, and fair workload – to patient outcomes
Increasing threats to labour rights, workplace protections, and democratic unionism
The critical importance of sustainable financing for public healthcare
These insights informed the Plan’s sharper focus on health governance, workforce justice, rights protection, and social dialogue.
At its heart, the Plan is anchored on three defining imperatives that will shape the Union’s agenda:
Organising for Justice: ensuring fair pay, safe workplaces, and full implementation of CBAs and labour agreements.
Confronting Power: holding duty bearers accountable through advocacy, dialogue, and, where necessary, industrial action.
Securing a Dignified Health System: one where transparency, adequate funding, equitable staffing, and patient safety are non-negotiable.
This Strategic Plan is not just an internal roadmap, it is a national call to action. It sets out what must be repaired to prevent system collapse, why investing in healthcare workers is a lifesaving imperative, and where Kenya must channel resources to strengthen care delivery.
Strategic Outcomes and Priority Areas
The Plan outlines clear strategic outcomes that KMPDU will pursue, including:
Full implementation of national and county CBAs
Fair and timely remuneration aligned to the cost of living
Strengthened occupational health and safety systems
Improved deployment, equitable staffing, and structured career progression
Protection of doctors’ democratic rights to organize, bargain, and strike
Enhanced union governance, transparency, financial accountability, and member services
Stronger advocacy for human resources for health (HRH) policies and legislation
Implementation and Accountability
The Strategic Plan includes a pragmatic implementation framework with:
A results-based monitoring and evaluation structure
Clear performance indicators
A risk mitigation matrix addressing political, legal, financial, and employer-related threats
Annual operational plans and reporting requirements
A governance model emphasizing transparency, internal cohesion, and financial sustainability
These structures ensure the Plan will not remain aspirational, but will be actively implemented, tracked, and reviewed.
A People-Centered Vision for Health
Ultimately, the Plan ties doctors’ welfare directly to patient outcomes. It asserts that a demoralized, underpaid, or unsafe workforce cannot deliver dignified care, and that Kenya’s health system will not thrive unless its workers do. It is a call for deliberate investment in the people who sustain the health system, and accountability for those entrusted with managing it.
Today’s launch marks a decisive moment. With this five-year Strategic Plan, KMPDU commits to reshaping the future of healthcare through bold advocacy, stronger organizing, constructive policy engagement, and relentless pursuit of justice for doctors and the patients they serve.
As KMPDU charts this new course, we reaffirm our commitment to working with government, institutions, and partners to ensure that every clause, every promise, and every reform outlined today is not merely aspirational, but implemented.
A stronger, fairer, people-centered health system is possible, and today’s launch marks a decisive step toward building it.
