SSWAB Trust celebrates 15 years of providing free dialysis

The SSWAB Trust, which runs a free-of-charge kidney care and dialysis centre in Karachi, celebrated their 15th anniversary at a hotel on Sunday.

Speaking on the occasion, the trust’s founding president Prof Dr Waqar Hussain Kazmi said that he had started this centre with seven dialysis machines in a rented building on Tariq Road, along with his four colleagues.

With time, owing to the help of donors, the centre has been expanded into a full-fledged facility in Gulistan-e-Jauhar that comprises 27 advanced dialysis machines, he added.

Kazmi specialised in nephrology in the US and later returned to Pakistan. He said he wanted to work for the prevention of kidney diseases in the country, where people could not afford the high cost of dialysis while the public health facilities were insufficient to deal with the number of patients.

Although the city already has the “best” kidney care facility in the form of the Sindh Institute of Urology & Transplantation, transplants require donors, who are not available in abundance, he added. Therefore, his centre focuses on providing dialysis that helps kidney patients survive, he pointed out.

Kazmi said that building centres for hepatitis and urology are among the future goals for SSWAB, since they are connected to kidney problems. He sought help from philanthropists to help his trust achieve these goals.

Former senator Abdul Haseeb Khan, who runs a pharmaceutical company and sits on the board of SSWAB, said the hepatitis and urology facility is estimated to cost around Rs700 million. He said that covering this cost would only be possible with the help of affluent people who want to give back to the community.

He said that their goal is to provide high-quality and adequate healthcare services to underprivileged people. “This is one of the ways through which we can contribute to making life healthier and easier for many.”

Hepatologist Prof Dr SM Wasim Jafri said that kidney problem is a non-infectious pandemic that is killing millions of people around the globe each year.

Shedding light on the prevention of this disease, he said that it is mostly linked to the type of food people consume in their daily lives. He urged people to develop sensitivity about this issue and get tested regularly to ensure its timely prevention.

Diabetologist Prof Dr Abdul Basit said diabetes is one of the major reasons for developing kidney diseases. He said that the burden of communicable diseases is yet to be tackled, but in the meantime, another challenge of non-communicable diseases has emerged.

He shared that around 400,000 legs of diabetics are being amputated each year to stop the disease from spreading to their whole bodies.

Dr Basit said that solutions to these problems are available, but they require efforts to be made available to the masses. He said that the use of medicated footwear is a proven method to prevent the development of a wound in a diabetic’s feet.