New Delhi: In a first, the Union Health Ministry is planning to offer peritoneal dialysis (PD) facility to kidney patients at their homes under the ‘Pradhan Mantri National Dialysis Programme’ (PMNDP).The programme was first launched in 2016 to provide free dialysis care to patients in district hospitals.
The aim is to achieve equity in patient access to home-based peritoneal dialysis and reduce the overall cost of care to the system by focusing on efficient leveraging of resources, a senior health ministry official said Monday.
PD dialysis filters the blood in a different way than the more common blood-filtering procedure hemodialysis (HD). It uses the lining of the abdomen and a cleaning solution called dialysate to cleanse the blood.
“Dialysis programmes around the world are developed on a combination of haemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis. Given that peritoneal dialysis avoids the substantial costs of infrastructure set up and maintenance and staffing, reduces the demand on healthcare system and offers patient autonomy, inclusion of peritoneal dialysis in the ambit of the National Dialysis Programme is being considered,” the official said.
The Centre announced the ‘National Dialysis Programme’ in the 2016 budget. The first phase of this programme envisaged setting up of HD centres in all districts, which is being implemented. PD, however, was not included in this phase.
PD allows therapeutic intervention at home (or nearest to the community) which in turns reduces overall out-of-pocket expenditure by saving the wage loss of the patient and his attendant, which was not possible in HD patients requiring to travel to the district level twice/thrice weekly.
PTI
