I was recently visited by Thiagaraj, Chief Clinical Co-ordinator, Hemodialysis for Fresenius in India. He had visited me a few months back to see my home hemo setup.
He told me about his visit to Hong Kong to train on home hemo administration and training. Hong Kong and many parts of South East Asia have a very mature home hemo program. There are many people doing hemodialysis at home.
They have a three week training program where dialyzors are taught how to self-dialyze. This is followed by a one week monitoring session at home. After this they are on their own. There is regular monitoring by the center. They also use the buttonhole technique using needles manufactured in Korea.
The government bears all the expenses provided the dialyzor works full time. This was an interesting piece of information. How much the individual earned was immaterial. The only requirement was that he or she worked full time.
He also took some pictures and videos of two people starting dialysis on their own. These people were fairly at ease with the process. They were however not very computer or internet savvy and did not have an online presence.
I asked him if he could arrange nocturnal dialysis for me if I wished to visit that part of the world. He said he could definitely arrange that! That was really good to know because I would like to go to Phuket after hearing my friend Aditya raving about it.
I was surprised to hear about the home hemo program in South East Asia from Thiagaraj because I haven't heard anything at all about it until now. If its not on the internet, I guess, we tend to assume it does not exist!
There was another very exciting development about which I learnt during Thiagaraj's visit. More on that soon.
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