Kidney patients suffered badly as dialysis services remained halted for seven hours at two public hospitals in Dhaka and Chattogram. The private service providers suddenly stopped their operations at the hospitals demanding dues from the Directorate General of Health Services. The service providers also threatened to completely shut down the services if the dues are not paid quickly. As the services stopped, kidney patients gathered in front of the National Institute of Kidney Diseases and Urology. Refusing the service of basic healthcare and hosting the patients to realise demands is the worst example.
Sandor Dialysis Services Bangladesh, a concern of India’s Sandor Medicaids Pvt Ltd, has been providing the services at the 69-bed dialysis centre of NIKDU since November 28, 2016, and at the 31-bed dialysis centre at CMCH since February 28, 2017. As per the PPP agreement, Sandor is supposed to provide 21,450 dialysis sessions per year for Tk 5.30cr. The amount would increase by five per cent every year as per the deal. Sandor officials claimed it provided additional 95,696 sessions in 2020 and 2021 after being asked by the DGHS, but they were not paid for the extra sessions.
DGHS owes us Tk 23 crore. If Sandor stops providing the services, the government needs to think about alternatives. According to an estimate of 2019, around 30,000 patients needed kidney dialysis in the country. For them, there are only 130 private and public dialysis centres, most of which are situated in the capital. The cost for each dialysis session at a private hospital ranged between Tk 2,800 and Tk 7,000. The government launched the PPP deal to cut the cost to Tk 400-600 by providing subsidies.
The government needs to improve basic healthcare services and local healthcare entrepreneurs should come up with the service at an affordable cost. We cannot let the patients die due to our sheer negligence to equip up hospitals and healthcare facilities when corruption in hospital equipment purchase becomes national shame.
