Ahmedabad: Strengthening its presence to serve bigger number of ESRD (End-stage-Renal Disease) patients, Institute of Kidney Diseases & Research Centre (IKDRC) added four more dialysis centres in its network in three districts on Wednesday.

Two dialysis centres are opened in Gandhinagar district at Kalol and Mansa while one each at Jamjodhpur and Wankaner in Jamnagar and Morbi districts respectively. These centres are equipped with 21 avant-garde dialysis machines with RO plant facility. Commissioning of four more centres will make it possible for a population over 50 lakhs in these districts to provide first available renal care with last mile connectivity to ESRD patients.

“It is our endeavour to make dialysis services accessible to each ESRD patient in the state within a distance 30 kilometers to reduce travel time to make dialysis procedure easily accessible and comfortable,” Dr Vineet Mishra, Director-IKDRC-ITS commented on the opening of four centres on Wednesday. According to Dr Mishra, reducing travel time to reach dialysis centre is extremely important due to 3-4 hours duration taken to perform dialysis on a single ESRD patient. “If a patient spends more than an hour to reach dialysis centre the entire day gets wasted and productivity of the accompanying person is also hampered,” explained Dr Mishra.

Gujarat Dialysis Programme (GDP) is IKDRC’s flagship programme under the aegis of Government of Gujarat to provide free dialysis to ESRD patients in the state. IKDRC shoulders its responsibility to provide trained manpower, consumables, maintenance, nephrologist and fistula surgeon to ESRD patients. Provisions to allocate space at district hospitals, sub-district hospitals, medical colleges and GMERS medical colleges to run GDP centres is done through Government of Gujarat.

“We are committed to implement Gujarat model of quality dialysis to make life of an ESRD patient better and also in a position to share technological and logistical to other institutions,” said Dr Mishra.

GDP is the biggest network of dialysis centres in the country with 51 centres under its umbrella equipped with state-of-art 500 dialysis machines and performs more than 3 lakhs dialysis a year.