Patients at risk as Haripur hospital stops free dialysis.

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...