ANEMIC with the budget that should sustain a health program across the country, renal disease specialists now eye partnerships with local government units to get partnership funds to get the campaign seeping to puroks.
Dr. Remedios de Belen-Uriarte told a conference in Cebu that the country’s Renal Disease Control Program (REDCOP) is funded by the National Kidney Transplant Institute (NKTI).
According to Dr. Uriarte, REDCOP was launched in 1994. That time, they immediately put up trainings for volunteer advocates to cascade the information down.
However, a lot of things happened between 1994 to present, the group lost most of its trained coordinators in the regions.
In the same span too, renal disease has killed about 7,000, Philippine Renal Disease Registry data showed, making the disease the tenth most fatal in the country.
In fact, in the Central Visayas, renal disease may have climbed as the 6th killer disease, adds Dr. Jot Abellana, Central VIsayas REDCOP Coordinator.
Yet, despite the alarming increase in affectation, health authorities at the NKTI see the fact that if national governments do not have the luxury of funding such a program, then perhaps partnering with local governments may be the only option.
Always at the end of requests for assistance to financially aid patients undergoing treatment, local governments now want to put an end to the dole outs and face the problem of disease prevention squarely.
With local governments now running their respective preventive medicine programs in the grassroots, the REDCOP also hopes to hitch with a little cash infusions to make the local programs go the distance.
In the case of renal disease patients, the large sums spent to aid the patients may now be judiciously used to kepp the prevention side of the program running.
In the end, REDCOP hopes to persuade local governments to make the cheap urine analysis one of the free services.
Urinalysis especially when the physicians suspect kidney problems, is by far the most effective way of renal problem early detection.
An early detection of an acute glumerulonephritis allows experts to properly refer the patient to the right doctor to treat him, Dr Uriarte said.
This way, we do not necessarily have to go for the organ transplantation which is expensive, she ends. (rachiu/PIA)