Kidney-failure patients receive treatment at the Hanoi Department of Health’s Center for Nephrology and Hemodialysis.

With renal failure afflicting well over five million people in Vietnam, the cost of treatment is imposing a great burden on society, according to a conference in Ho Chi Minh City on Saturday.

Last year, the total compensation exceeded VND1 trillion (US$55.5 million), Huong told the Artificial Kidneys and the Quality of Dialysis conference.

Health insurance pays VND400,000 ($22.21) each time a patient has dialysis, which translates to an annual expense above VND100 million ($5,551), according to Huong.

Specific cases were also reported at the conference, like the construction engineer in HCMC’s Cu Chi District, who must go to Cho Ray Hospital for dialysis every week, no matter how far he is working from the hospital.

“Without health insurance, I could not afford the treatment on my salary for long,” the engineer told visiting urologists from abroad and specialists from 30 Vietnamese hospitals.

A patient from Binh Tan District said she had mortgaged her house four years ago to pay for treatment.

“Even with health insurance, once you’ve got kidney failure you’ll never have enough money to afford the treatment,” the woman said.

The expense of dialysis is only one part of the story; the other is the overloading of Vietnam’s hospitals, which don’t have anywhere near enough facilities for treating everyone with renal failure.

Vietnam has around 5.4 million people with renal failure, or 6.73 percent of the total population, said Dr. Nguyen Nguyen Khoi from Hanoi’s Bach Mai Hospital, adding that some 500 million people have the disorder worldwide.

While 72,000 of that number in Vietnam are in the final stage where dialysis is the only viable option, the nation’s hospitals can only handle 10 percent of them.

The other 90 percent are dying, Dr. Khoi said.

HCMC accounts for 32 percent of the patients with renal failure nationwide, said Dr. Ta Phuong Dung from the People’s Hospital 115, where 900 patients are regularly hooked up to the dialysis machines.

In all, the city has 19 medical clinics able to treat kidney failure, with 336 dialysis machines between them.

Cho Ray, one of HCMC’s biggest hospitals, is treating over 700 chronic cases with 46 dialysis machines operating in four shifts a day, with each shift lasting three to four hours.

It treats a further 200 acute kidney failure patients every day, not including 30-40 daily emergency cases.

Last year, Vietnam developed a simple device for Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis (CAPD), which merely requires a plastic bag and a catheter and can be used in any clean, well-lit place, Dr. Khoi said.

The health ministry plans to introduce 40 CAPDs into Vietnam’s hospitals this year and more next year, which should partly ease the burden of renal failure, Dr. Khoi said.

Other suggestions were also aired at the conference, like setting up specialized clinics with dialysis machines away from the hospitals.

Huong from the health ministry said the cost of kidney failure treatment should be taken into consideration when the ministry proposes new hospital fees.

Dr. Khoi said it was time to start public-awareness campaigns about preventing kidney disorders and for the government to formulate a strategy for treating renal failure so that patients could get proper treatment at a reasonable cost.

Source: TN, Agencies