Kenyan health workers carry the lightest wellbeing burden of the three countries in a new survey, but the burden is still heavy. More than eight in ten say they are burnt out, and nearly two in three have fallen asleep while on duty. 

The survey questioned 4,040 health workers in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria at a single point in time. It measured seven areas, including burnout, exhaustion, mental health, mood swings, sleeping while working, physical health and workload, and found that more than 60 per cent of health workers reported problems in each of the seven areas in all three countries. 

Kenya’s overall wellbeing burden in all seven areas stood at 69.3 per cent, the lowest of the three countries, against an average of 73.3 per cent. A higher score means health workers are struggling more. 

On burnout, 84 per cent of Kenyan respondents said they felt burnt out from their work. That matches Ghana and trails only Nigeria’s 94 per cent. Kenya also matched Ghana on falling asleep while working, at 63 per cent. Even the area where Kenya scored best, feeling that workloads were piling up too high, still affected 61 per cent of respondents. 

The study also offers early evidence of what might ease burnout. Hi-Five, a Kenyan programme, built wellbeing lessons into palliative care training, which teaches health workers to ease pain and distress in seriously ill patients. Trainees then taught colleagues, and together they reached 1,505 patients. 

Kenya has roughly three nurses for every 10,000 people, against a recommended minimum of 25 

The findings come from GHWP SG 60, a study funded by Global Health Partnerships (formerly THET) through its Global Health Workforce Programme. It was delivered by Kenya’s Institute of Applied Studies and Research alongside the Nigerian Medical Association and the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association. The survey ran from December 2024 to January 2025, and early findings were presented at the UK-Africa Health Summit on March 19, 2025. 

The findings fit what Kenyan health workers have been telling their unions and auditors for years. Seth Panyako, secretary general of the Kenya National Union of Nurses, says the country has roughly three nurses for every 10,000 people, against a recommended minimum of 25. He links the gap directly to burnout and to the long queues patients now face in public hospitals. 

A 2023 study in the Kenyan Journal of Nursing and Midwifery put burnout among nurses in public hospitals at 47.1 per cent. It blamed heavy workloads, little control over their own work, and weak support from supervisors. 

Hospital figures show the strain: 

• Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital: An audit for the year ending June 2025 found more than a thousand health worker posts unfilled, most of them for nurses. Its wards were already full well beyond capacity. 
• Kenyatta National Hospital: At times, more patients have needed beds than the hospital has, with occupancy above 120 per cent. 
• Migration: Roughly 4,000 doctors and nurses leave Kenya every year, according to figures cited by the former secretary general of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists’ Union (KMPDU). Most go to the United States, Namibia, Australia, Canada and the UK. 

The 2025 State of the World’s Nursing report, produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Council of Nurses, found that one nurse in many Kenyan public hospitals looks after 30 to 40 patients in a single shift. That is far more than WHO recommends. 

The same report found that Kenya now has 22.7 nurses for every 10,000 people, up from 8.3 a decade ago. That is an improvement, but still short of the recommended 25. 

Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale has acknowledged the deeper problem. Kenya, he notes, has never had a comprehensive policy on how its health professionals are trained and where they are posted. He points to a proposed Kenya Healthcare Professionals’ Policy for 2026 as the fix. 

By 2031, Kenya is projected to be short of nearly 62,000 community health nurses, more than half of the country’s total health workforce gap. Doctors remain in critically short supply, with fewer than one in four of the doctors needed actually in post. 

What Hi-Five did: It worked like a chain, with each group of trainees passing the skills on 

Hi-Five ran through the Kenya Hospice Palliative Care Association, St Christopher’s Hospice and the World Hospice Palliative Care Alliance. It worked like a chain, with each group of trainees passing the skills on: 

• Training: Seventy-one health workers took an online palliative care course at their own pace. Lessons on looking after their own wellbeing were built into the course rather than taught separately. 
• Mentoring: Sixty-four of them, or 90 per cent, went on to one-to-one mentoring. 
• Passing it on: They then trained 270 more health workers, nearly four for every original trainee. 
• Reaching patients: Together, they reached 1,505 patients, more than 21 for every original trainee. 

The trainees’ own words carry as much weight as the numbers. One described losing the shaking that used to come with difficult conversations with patients. “I am now very confident and have that stamina. This session has built me to be a very strong counsellor,” they said. 

Another said better communication skills had made them feel more capable. “When I talk to patients, they feel they are in safe hands. I now feel a sense of satisfaction in patient care.” 

A third described support spreading through their facility as trainees mentored colleagues in turn. Eventually, fifteen staff from different professions were supporting one another as a team. 

The researchers are careful about what Hi-Five can prove. They did not compare trainees with health workers who skipped the course, and they did not measure trainees’ wellbeing before and after. So the quotes show how the programme might help, not how much it helped. The next step is to survey the trainees with the same wellbeing questions used in the main study, which would allow a before-and-after comparison. 

How the three countries compare: Kenya is least affected followed by Ghana, Nigeria is worse off 

The three countries differ in how badly health workers are struggling, not in the kind of problems they face: 

• Nigeria is worst affected. It scored highest in five of the seven areas, with an overall score of 78.4, 5.1 points above the three-country average. That is the widest gap in the study. 
• Ghana sits in the middle, at 72.1. 
• Kenya is least affected, at 69.3. 

Across all three, burnout is the most common single problem, reported by 87.3 per cent of health workers on average. That is almost 25 points higher than the least common, falling asleep on duty, at 62.7 per cent. 

The figures have some limits: 

• No country numbers. The study reports only the total of 4,040 health workers, not how many were surveyed in each country. So the country comparisons show broad patterns but cannot be tested for statistical significance. 
• An internal mismatch. The study’s text says at least half of health workers reported problems in six of the seven areas, but its charts put all seven above 60 per cent in every country. 
• A simple average. The overall scores are a straight average of the seven areas, because the study gives no official method for combining them. 

A continental and global crisis 

Kenya’s experience reflects a workforce emergency across Africa. WHO’s Regional Office for Africa projects a shortage of 5.85 million health workers across the region by 2030. That is slightly below an earlier estimate of 6.1 million, but still more than half of the projected shortfall worldwide. 

The paradox, WHO Africa notes, is that the shortage exists alongside unemployment. An estimated 943,000 trained health workers in Africa were jobless in 2024, even as understaffed facilities struggled. 

The number of health workers per person also varies hugely across the region, from 0.25 per 1,000 people in Niger to 9.15 per 1,000 in Seychelles. Only Mauritius, Namibia, Seychelles and South Africa have enough to meet WHO’s recommended level. Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria all fall short. 

Burnout results from long-term workplace stress that has not been managed, leaving people exhausted 

The problem reaches rich countries too. A WHO review found that at least a quarter of health and care workers worldwide reported signs of anxiety, depression or burnout between January 2020 and April 2022, with no real improvement by 2024. WHO Europe’s MeND survey, published in October 2025, found that one in three doctors and nurses in the region reported depression or anxiety, and one in ten had recently had thoughts of self-harm. Many also described violence and bullying at work. 

WHO’s international list of diseases treats burnout as a work-related problem rather than a medical illness. It describes burnout as the result of long-term workplace stress that has not been managed, leaving people exhausted, detached from their work and less able to do it well. That description closely matches the seven areas measured in this study, from becoming emotionally hardened to physical health getting in the way of daily work. 

What sets this study apart is that it does not stop at describing the problem. Hi-Five suggests that building wellbeing into existing clinical training, rather than running a separate workshop, costs little extra and still makes a difference that health workers can feel. 

The fuller picture is still emerging. Similar work in Nigeria and Ghana is still underway, and the researchers have yet to publish their full findings. But the data already show, consistently and across borders, that burnout is not the exception in this workforce. It is the

Data visualisation: Stanley Njihia 

Text: Yvonne Kawira