The suffering of kidney patients

Kidney failure, which is getting more and more common in Nepal, is potentially deadly. It is also an expensive ailment to treat. This is why the government heavily subsidizes dialysis (basically, getting an external machine to ‘clean the blood’ in lieu of the kidneys), as well as transplant of new kidneys. The post-transplant medicines are also subsidized. Yet there is a problem.

 

Even as renal failure is a matter of life and death for many sufferers, the government health bureaucracy takes six to seven months to clear the subsidies that all kidney-failure patients are entitled to. As our report this week points out, there have been cases, for instance, when a subsidy for the medicines of a patient was cleared only after six months of the transplant, by which time even the new kidney had developed complications. 

 

Another problem is that while there are only 410 dialysis machines in the country to provide subsidized care, the number of patients is constantly increasing. Every year, there are 3,000 new cases of kidney failures and in many of the cases the patients will need life-long dialysis. But all the available machines are occupied by old patients. Also, the dialysis and transplant services are heavily concentrated in one or two urban hubs.

 

There is thus an urgent need to improve the services for needy kidney failure patients. Moreover, if the symptoms of kidney failure can be spotted early, then in most cases they are completely treatable. Early detection programs could also significantly reduce the growing burden on the state that comes with heavily subsidized renal failure treatment.

 

 

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