You're reading: Dialysis patients in Kyiv alarmed as vital drug supplies get patchy

Kyiv’s peritoneal dialysis patients say they are needlessly having trouble getting a reliable supply of vital medicines, ever since supply of the drugs was taken over by a new hospital.

Any
interruption of supply of medicine is life-threatening, patients say.

“A
patient needs to get fresh dialysis medication every 12 hours or so. If he
doesn’t, he starts to die slowly,” says Andriy Barko, one of the upset patients.
“As of September, the delivery of my medications became irregular. It’s like
I’m on the hook, not knowing if I get my medicine on time.”

Tetiana
Olkhovych says that her husband Maksym Olkhovych has had troubles getting his
daily medication for almost two months and that some 40 other patients she’s in
contact with experienced similar problem. “For four days in August he didn’t
have any medicine at all. We asked other patients, who had some spare packages,
for help,” Tetiana says.

The
medicines are supplied to Barko, Olkhovych and 55 other patients in Kyiv by the
city and are paid for from the city budget. Medications for dialysis are not
available in pharmacies, so these supplies are the only way to get them.
Deliveries are organized by one of the city hospitals. In August, City Hospital
#3 was put in charge of it.

Patients
with supply delays say they were getting calls from City Hospital #3, demanding
that they register in that hospital as patients in order to stop the delays.
They say such calls violate their legal right to choose where to get treatment.
Tetiana Olkhovych says that these calls are blackmail, and says her husband was
clearly told that that he has to move hospitals to get timely treatment.

Eduard
Krasiuk, head doctor of Nephrology Center of City Hospital #3, denies that
patients are obliged to be treated in his hospital after registration, but
confirms that doctors did call patients asking them to re-register.

Krasiuk
also denies the allegations that treatment is denied to anyone, saying the
hospital is just creating a registry of all patients who need dialysis
medicines. At the same time he confirmed that documents can be transferred from
another hospital without patients’ participation, and couldn’t explain why, in
that case, his staff demanded that the patients show up.

“If
supplies were interrupted, it was probably due to some delivery schedule
changes made by delivery company,” Krasiuk says.

However,
Bakmed, the company that does the actual delivery, says all changes in the
schedule are authorized by the doctors, and the company performs a purely
technical function.

“Our
only function is to delivery medicines according to the forms that we get from
hospital #3,” says Sergiy Khrystynchenko, deputy director of Bakmed. “Once we
get the forms, we make a delivery. We’re not short of medicine. Ee have two
months’ worth of medications stocked.”

After
the City Health Agency’s special session on Oct. 4, patients were promised to get
medicine soon, but just a two weeks supply, not a month’s supply as it used to
be. And it remains unclear if patients will have to be admitted to City
Hospital #3.

“At
least patients’ lives are not in danger anymore, for now,” Tetiana Olkhovych
says.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be
reached at [email protected].