By Samiullah Khan Penda Khel

Seven years have passed since Mr. Shahbaz Sharif vowed to provide the Nawaz Sharif Kidney Hospital to the people of Swat during their Internal Displacement. He promised the hospital because a high number of the IDPs suffered from the deadly kidney disease.  That promise has not been fulfilled. There is still no Nawaz Sharif Hospital to treat the poor patients with this terrible disease.

Poor patients continue to die because the nearest kidney center or hospital, Hayat Abad Kidney Center, is hundreds of kilometer from Swat, Dir, Buner and Chitral. The poor cannot easily travel the long distance and cannot afford to pay for the treatments.

The Hayat Abad Medical Complex is the only place in all of Khyber Paktun Khwa with a kidney center with facilities to treat thousands of kidney patients from all over the province. But most of the patients are in poor financial position and their health condition makes it difficult to travel the long distances to the kidney center.

The poor kidney patients embrace sure death helplessly. There is no one out there who feels their pain and raises a voice for them, not even the selected representatives throughout Swat who are provincial ministers, advisers to the Chief Minister and even the Prime Minister.

The major part of the hospital was the construction of the building. That has already been completed but a few minor things still stand in the way before the hospital becomes operational.

The hospital’s Deputy Medical Superintendent has identified several problems. i) Staffing of suitable technical staff for relevant technical positions and ii) low voltage of electricity. There is an urgent need to fix these two problems in order to treat more than 600 registered kidney patients.

A majority of these registered kidney patients have severe kidney problems (kidney failure) and require regular dialysis to keep their creatinine and urea under control to survive. Most of these are poor patients who cannot afford to travel to Peshawar for their treatment (dialysis). As a result their health condition is deteriorating day by day. Many of them are dying but no one cares.

Among the many serious patient interviewed is S. Khan who is from a middle class family. She was diagnosed to receive dialysis six months ago and has been travelling to Hayat Abad Kidney Center Peshawar for her dialysis once a week. However recently Ms. Khan’s levels of creatinine and urea went up  and her doctors told her she needs  dialysis twice a week in order to stay alive. Ms. Khan cannot afford to travel Kidney Center twice a week and has to be complacent with one dialysis per week.

Apart from her health problems Ms. Khan faces many other social and domestic problems which are simply not bearable for her as a patient with severe kidney disease. She has to deal with her husband, in-laws and compromise on her kids’ health to travel even once a week. Simply put, the treatment leads to many domestic problems and the stress has an adverse  effect on her health.

Apart from financial problems, treatment at Hayat Abad Kidney Center itself has some demerits. The overburdened kidney center cannot maintain the quality of its services. Thus kidney patients undergoing dialysis also contract the dangerous disease of hepatitis because the same machines are also used by patients infected with hepatitis.

That is what happened to Ms. S. Khan. Because of the carelessness of the center’s staff she became infected with hepatitis from the use of an infected dialysis machine. Her husband could hardly bear the expenses of her travels and medication to cure hepatitis. She had no choice but to buy very expensive tablets worth RS 33500 per packet that contains 30 tablets or enough for a month.

She took the tablets until she recovered from hepatitis. It took her 6 packets to be cured of hepatitis. This would have not been possible without the financial assistance from her brothers and uncles because her husband simply declined to buy the tablets as he didn’t have money.

If a middle-class patient faces so many problems in paying for medicines, then imagine what it is like for poor patients who do not even have money to fulfill their basic food needs. These poor patients cannot afford to travel to a hospital so far away if they get infected with hepatitis from infected machines. Their only choice is to wait for a death.

Let us appeal on humanitarian ground to both Provincial and Federal Governments to take immediate action to sort out these tiny problems that have very high repercussions on the lives of kidney patients of Malakand Division and specifically people of Swat. Kidney disease is leading to loss of many precious lives—of people who are someone’s parents, children, or brothers and sisters. Let us put ourselves in their shoes for a while to feel the pain. According to the Deputy Medical Superintendent (DMS) the solution to both problems is hiring of suitable staff as per the Government staffing and hiring procedure. They must start the process. The permanent solution to the low voltage also exist. There is one express line leading to Paitham institute of hotel and tourism management Guli Bagh Swat. The same line could be shared with the Kidney Center to solve the low voltage problem for ever.