HAVING used up my initial retirement pay I received in one instance for my occasional hospital confinement and four-times-a-week dialysis for kidney failure, I pray health authorities would act with dispatch on the following to accommodate and save more of the growing number of patients who have to maintain their blood-cleansing session for life:
1. Provide dialysis centers in all provincial and city hospitals in the country. There is not much budget needed, except for the hospital to provide the venue where private companies like will set up the machines and provide personnel to man the center after winning a bid for the same.
At present, the Fresenius-managed center at the Baguio General Hospital is swamped daily with walk-in patients from all over Northern Luzon who hope to be accommodated when a regular patient fails to appear on his schedule. The center is swamped with patients from outside the Cordillera because their own provincial and city hospitals have yet to open their centers for this urgent, life-saving procedure.
“We have private dialysis centers in our province but they charge more than double the rates here,” a woman patient from Pangasinan said.
Hospital authorities have no choice but to allow her and other patients coming in from other provinces to sleep on the pews of the hospital chapel as they could not = financially or physically – travel back home and be back for their next treatment.
2. Health authorities should accredit provincial and private hospitals so patients would not have to come to the BGHMC because it is one of the few facilities which accept dialysis payments using the 90-sessions-per-year support of PhilHealth and the medical assistance funds of senators and congressmen.
3. Health and other regulatory authorities should check on the exorbitant rates being charged by private dialysis centers and hospitals, including their room rates and medicines. It would be of great help to us patients if private hospitals and doctors would advise us to buy our own medicines instead of the facility dispensing and over-pricing the same despite their Biblical claim their facility was built to serve the poor, as is the will of their Maker.
4. Hospitals should check on the competence or sanity of their dieticians who allow meal servers to include bananas for patients undergoing dialysis. A patient unaware of the ill effects of potassium may endanger himself by feasting on a bunch brought in by a well-meaning visitor.
5. On top of these is our prayer that the bill for free dialysis co-authored by Baguio Rep. Marquez Go, which has passed first reading, would be adopted by Congress. That would save thousands of patients from the daily mental torture of having to scrounge for funds for the next dialysis. Dialysis, together with heart surgery is done for free in the United States and Europe because these are emergency, life-saving procedures. Here, patients squeezed dry by the cost of dialysis are faced with no choice but to go home and die. – e-mail mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.