From Okey Sampson, Umuahia
Lack of qualified medical personnel and equipment as well as huge financial cost have been identified as among the greatest challenges to the treatment of kidney diseases at the Federal Medical Center (FMC), Umuahia.
A kidney specialist and transplant nephrologist at the hospital, Dr Chimezie Okwuonu who made this known at the 5th anniversary of the Kidney Transplant Programme in the hospital, said the financial requirement of N9m was becoming unbearable for patients and called on governments and organisations to assist the patients to have successful transplant.
He explained that in addition to financial constraints, unavailability of machines, kidney donor issues and brain drain had also hit the Programme with the result that two of the five surgeons have migrated for greener pastures.
Dr Okwuonu said the FMC Umuahia was the only Kidney Transplant Center in the South East with 10 transplantations and 70 percent success and called on patients to seek early treatment.
He said it was regrettable that patients with as much as N5m could not have a transplant.
“The main purpose of our gathering here today is to celebrate the success we have achieved, enumerate our challenges and discuss the way forward. And we have seen that we have been able to perform 10 kidney transplantation with 70 percent success within this five years, which is comparable to what we have in India, in America and the UK.
“In terms of our challenges we have identified financial challenges on the part of our patients from obtaining a kidney transplant programme. We saw from our data that we have patients that have N3m but they were not able to afford a transplant, even N4m, N5m, because our transplant programme is N9m, N7.5m for the surgery and N1.5m for the tests that are required”.
Okwuonu said they are considering how to reduce the cost of the Programme which he said could be done by batching the patients together.
The Chairman Medical Advisory Committee (CMAC), FMC, Dr Ugochukwu Onyeonoro informed that the hospital management would support the transplant programme with drugs, machines, training and finance.
This is even as the Director of the Kidney Transplant Programme, Dr Anosike Erondu, stressed the need for a Foundation that could subsidize the cost for the patients.