Ms. Nancy Abedi, a dialysis nurse at the International Maritime Hospital (IMaH), has urged the government to consider building at least one dialysis facility in each region to provide the necessary care for local patients.
Ms. Abedi emphasised the need for subsidies to make treatment affordable for the disease’s most disadvantaged patients as well as a call to health institutions to partner the government to establish facilities across Ghana.
Ms. Abedi made the appeal at the weekly “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility! A Ghana News Agency Tema Regional Office initiative aimed at promoting communication on health-related topics and setting the medium for the propagation of health information to influence personal health choices by improving health literacy.
“Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility! is a public health advocacy platform initiated by the Ghana News Agency Tema Regional Office to explore the parameters of the four approaches to health communication: informative, educating, persuasive, and prompting.
She stated that most regions lacked dialysis facilities to accommodate patients, forcing some of them to travel great distances to receive care. She also spoke about the number of dialysis machines available for the management of the diseases.
According to Ms. Abedi, the Eastern Region and other regions do not have any centres at all, while the Volta Region only recently received one.
She added that there were currently five privately operated centres in the Tema area and the cost of dialysis is high due to the operation of the electricity-powered machine and water treatment facilities.
Currently, a patient needs at least three dialysis treatments per week to wash out the toxins and additional water from their system because their kidneys are unable to do so on their own, according to the expert, and each session costs between GHs500.00 and GHC600.00.
“I have patients who were in the middle class, unemployed, with some as young as 23 years old; it has no class preference—the poor and the rich are all prone to it,” Ms. Abedi dispelled the misconception that kidney illness was a condition for the wealthy.
FA/BM/GRB
