Twenty-two patients on dialysis treatment are stranded at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) where they were referred from Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre in October last year.
The referral was due to a faulty dialysis unit at QECH.
KCH director Ennock Chiludzu confirmed the development in an interview on Thursday, saying the patients have since been admitted to his facility since they cannot be commuting from Blantyre for treatment.
Said Chiludzu: “They were referred from Blantyre in October and since they do not have relatives near KCH, we admitted them so that they can be receiving treatment until QECH unit is repaired.”
Normally, patients on dialysis are treated as outpatients.
Some of the patients who spoke to Weekend Nation said staying in the hospital is posing an added health risk because they are not provided with a recommended diet for kidney patients.
“For example, here we are being fed nsima and beans every day since October, yet we are told that beans are not good for patients with kidney failure. At least at home we are able to check our diets,” said one of the patients.
He said they have been engaging authorities on the matter, including suggesting looking for donors who can support the hospital in providing a healthy diet for them until they return to their homes.
Budgets for the country’s major referral hospitals are controlled at the central government and, in an interview on Thursday, Ministry of Health spokesperson Adrian Chikumbe attributed the challenge on diets to lack of funds.
“We have tried to engage private caterers and we found that they were costing three times more than the K11 million we used to spend per month, but still with our resources, it’s hard,” said Chikumbe, further underscoring the need for support from development partners.
In a separate interview, QECH director Kelvin Mponda said they might resume dialysis services next week following a commitment from a contractor who was engaged to supply equipment for the unit.
“We have been assured by the contractor that we will get a temporary equipment which can run for two months as we wait for another machine from Germany,” he said.
Mponda said the old dialysis unit started giving problems in 2018, a year before the contract between the hospital and the supplier expired, but the two parties agreed that the contractor should continue maintaining the unit.
He said the problems continued until 2023 when the contractor recommended replacement of the equipment and they started negotiations for a new contract, which was finalised in December 2024.
An analysis by our sister newspaper Nation on Sunday in December 2023 found that the QECH dialysis unit served at least 25 adults who had end stage kidney disease (ESKD) requiring treatment from Monday to Saturday.
On the other hand, KCH served about 34 patients undergoing dialysis twice a week.
Nation on Sunday’s findings further established that repairing the machines then would cost about K60 million, a situation which attracted criticism from the Parliamentary Committee on Health and health rights activists, who felt that could have been avoided had right decisions been made at the right time.
