HARIPUR: Life of dozens of poor kidney patients is at risk as the administration of the district headquarter hospital, Haripur, has stopped providing free dialysis facility to them, patients and official sources said on Monday.

The sources said the dialysis centre at the hospital has four dialysis machines. However, the hospital staff, which interestingly has no nephrologist or urologist, conducts 21 dialysis daily during three shifts.

As per a decision of the Health Management Board (HMB) that was constituted during 2009 with the deputy commissioner as its head, free dialysis of all the patients was allowed as the hospital had sufficient funds from its own resources.

According to the sources, the hospital’s major source of income was from the services it extended to the students of a private medical college under a decade-long MoU with the health department. However, it was phased out on June 30, 2019. But the hospital management continued to offer free dialysis facilities till the last three months when a private supplier abruptly stopped supplying dialysis kits and additional medicines and equipment required for dialysis as the hospital management refused to clear the outstanding bills amounting to Rs7.1 million.

The sources said when the supplier suspended operations, the hospital management, as a makeshift arrangement, made the patients to purchase dialysis kits and even the masking tape and water used for dialysis, from the local market.

“I had to purchase the kits to save life of my mother,” Bilawal Malik, whose mother gets her dialysis twice a week, said. He said a patient had to spend Rs4,500 on purchase of dialysis kit, injections, water and even masking tape for a single dialysis, and those needing dialysis twice a week had to spend at least Rs10,000.

“How a patient can survive on paid dialysis for a long time, especially those whose attendants and families are daily wage earners,” Naveed Khan, whose brother has to undergo dialysis twice a week, said.

He said when a family failed to arrange money for dialysis the procedure certainly got delayed exposing a patient to multiple health complications. “I know the families whose three members have died during the last fortnight due to delayed dialysis as the families were unable to arrange money,” he said.

The official sources said the district administration with Rs40.85 million at its disposal could resume free dialysis helping the poor patients to survive for another few years.

When contacted, medical superintendent Dr Waheed Qureshi confirmed that the hospital was facing funds shortage. He said the HMB had funds to the tune of over Rs40 million at its disposal, which could be used for free dialysis.

He also admitted that the patients were purchasing own kits and other medicines.

Dr Qureshi said the matter of utilisation of HMB funds had been taken up with secretary health Syed Imtiaz Hussain Shah. He said the patients’ complaints of paid dialysis were likely to be addressed within next few days. He denied that three patients had died due to delay in dialysis.

GIRL DROWNS: A 10-year-old girl drowned in River Daur on Monday.

Police quoted witnesses as saying that an elderly woman was busy washing clothes at the banks of the river near Baldhair village when her granddaughter, Khaista Bibi, 10, slipped into the water and was swept away by strong currents.

The rescuers fished out the body and shifted it to Haripur Trauma Centre.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2020