Dr Maxwell Okoth is the founder of the Ruai Family Hospitals, whose headquarters are located on Kangundo Road in Ruai, Nairobi County.
His resolve to open the facility began when he was 25 years old, working as an intern at a public hospital in central Kenya.
It was during that time that he encountered firsthand the challenges plaguing Kenya’s healthcare system, such as frequent power outages and shortages of key medical supplies.
Okoth’s eureka moment happened one day as he was doing his rounds in the hospital’s theatre.
“While working as an intern, I saw a gap in the area of access and provision of affordable health care, and that’s when this dream started. There was a huge health need in the country that needed to be fixed, especially in maternal and child health care,” he said.
After graduating with a degree in medicine fom the University of Nairobi in 2010, Okoth decided to venture into the healthcare business, settling on Ruai as his area of operation.
Ruai was a prime location because it had a shortage of professionally run healthcare facilities, meaning the competition was minimal.
Despite his young age, Okoth was already a seasoned entrepreneur, having been involved in developing Kenya’s first e-commerce platform known as mkopa.co.ke during his university days.
He opened the doors of Ruai Hospital on September 11, 2011, using a KSh 300,000 loan he had taken from his mother’s retirement funds.
The first people he hired were a lab technician and a clinical officer.
He used his salary as a doctor at the district hospital to pay their salaries and meet his hospital’s day-to-day costs before the business became profitable.
“I was paying the employees, including rent and buying clinic supplies from my pocket, and as an intern, I was just being paid 48,000 shillings,” said Okoth, who hails from Homa Bay County.
In 2012, his business was severely affected after he was transferred to the Nyeri Provincial Hospital, which is located 150 km away from Nairobi.
In December that year, he was travelling from Nyeri to visit his facility when he was involved in a gruesome road accident that left his car damaged beyond repair.
Insurance paid him KSh 600,000 as compensation, which Okoth decided to invest in his business. He used the money to make a down payment for an X-ray machine, an ultrasound machine, and other theatre equipment.
The equipment was worth about ksh 4 million, and the terms of purchase were that he would fork out Ksh 232,000 in monthly loan repayments.
“I had no idea where I was going to get the money. I only had faith that things would work out in my favour,” he explained.
He hoped that with the new equipment he could attract patients who were visiting the nearby under-equipped public hospital.
Unfortunately, things did not work out as he expected, and he was forced to take a bank loan to find the money for his first repayment.
However, when he found time to visit his clinic and conduct a proper audit of his books, he was surprised to learn that his staff had been sabotaging his business.
They had been reporting an average of six patients daily, but Okoth served 20 patients on the first day that he spent at the clinic.
“So I fired all of them,” he said. ” This was like a rebirth of Ruai Family Hospital. It’s always dark before dawn,” he said.
In June 2014, he received a loan of ksh 8 million from the government-run Youth Development Enterprise Fund (YDEF), which he used to boost his business.
He relocated the clinic to an imposing modern three-story building in Ruai town and quickly became the largest private healthcare facility in the area.
By then, the hospital had 40 beds and had employed 12 permanent employees, with Okoth even affording to hire top doctors when needed.
The hospital served about 60 patients daily and was even listed with all major insurance facilities in the country, including the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF).
In 2017, Okoth bought land in Ruai and began building a landmark hospital in 2019.
On completion, he named the 100-bed facility the RSF Family Hospital, preserving the ‘DNA’ of his first business.
Today, Ruai Family Hospital operates 11 branches across Nairobi and other towns such as Ruiru, Imara Daima, and Kiambu Road.