Health Minister promises financial assistance for dialysis patients to roll out next week

The Guyana Government in the 2022 budget has allocated approximately $180M to alleviate the
burden of expensive dialysis treatment for persons with chronic kidney disease.
Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony, on Friday announced that the initiative will be rolled out in
the coming week, providing $600, 000 annually to all patients on dialysis treatment. “Right now,
there are a number of persons who require dialysis and generally these persons would have end
stage renal failure…the challenge however is that persons are not able to pay for their dialysis
treatment,” Dr. Anthony said.
He continued, “So, we want to start sometime next week to start distributing the cheques to these
patients.”  Minister Anthony said even with a number of non-governmental organisations
providing dialysis to patients and subsidising the cost, it remains a challenge especially for
persons receiving dialysis three times per week.
As such, he issued a call to persons to visit the Health Ministry and get registered as soon as
possible. “We’re right now in the process of registering those patients, so anyone who knows of
anybody who needs dialysis you can get them to register with the ministry,” he said. The health
minister noted that a medical document and the persons biodata will be required, to confirm that
person is on dialysis or is recommended for the treatment.
“We of course will have to validate that that person is actually on dialysis or was recommended
for dialysis so a medical document to verify that will have to be produced and once we have that
and the person’s biodata, then we’re able to put them on a database and we’ll be able to issue
them with the funding,” he added. Dr. Anthony said that additional information can be accessed
through advertisements in the newspapers, social media, the health ministry’s Facebook page
along with telephone numbers for further queries on the initiative.