KAPIT: Kapit is in dire need of more haemodialysis machines to cater for its kidney patients here. At its recent meeting ,Persatuan Pesakit Buah Pinggang Kapit revealed that for the whole of Kapit Division there were only twenty haemodialysis machines for the kidney patients which is rather insufficient. Of the 20 haemodialysis machines, fifteen are at Kapit Hospital and another five are at the Song Health Clinic. There is none at Belaga Health Clinic or Sungai Asap Health Clinic. The maximum slot for this are only sixty kidney patients.
One patient per cleaning session requires four hours to undergo haemodialysis and thrice a week. Each patient has to undergo haemodialysis treatment on Monday, Wednesday and Friday or Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Both centres at Kapit Hospital and Song Health Clinic run three shifts a day until late into the evening.
Because of the large number of kidney patients in Kapit, more haemodialysis machines are needed. Some of them in the past were forced to refer to Song Health Clinic. However, this had caused great inconvenience to the patients because of the two hours travel time from Kapit to Song and back to Kapit. Added the four hours of dialysis it makes a minimum of six hours.
Only one kidney patient from Belaga District undergoes haemodialysis at Kapit Hospital. The other patients were referred to Bintulu Hospital to undergo haemodialysis. From Belaga to Bintulu requires some three to four hours of travel on land and from Sungai Asap about two hours.
Seeing the seriousness of the problem, Persatuan Pesakit Buah Pinggang Kapit has called on the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH) to address the problem.. The main problem with the Haemodialysis Unit at Kapit Hospital is the limited space to put up more machines to cope up with the ever increasing demand. The number of kidney patients requiring haemodialysis treatment keeps on increasing but there is no space for more machines.
All these years, Kapit folks had called for the construction of a new block of multi-storey building to accommodate the various healthcare services but so far the MOH has yet to give a positive response. Even the X-Ray machine is very old and requires servicing now and then.
Although the hospital is trying its very best to enhance the healthcare services, sadly there is not even a CD Scanner Machine, Radiologist, General Surgeon, Orthopedic Surgeon, Eye Specialist, Cardiologist, and other specialists. Patients in the past were forced to refer to Sibu Hospital or Sarawak General Hospital in Kuching on medical referral.
Kapit the last frontier of Sarawak over the years have seen various basic infrastructure and amenity projects being implemented by the government to improve the standard of living. Being the Kapit Division administrative centre that covers four districts ( Belaga, Bukit Mabong, Kapit and Song) and two sub-districts namely Sungai Asap and Nanga Merit, the only hospital, Kapit Hospital formally Christ Hospital built in 1958 by the Methodist Mission, has basically physically remained unchanged except for one block of four-storey concrete building erected in the 1980s but that isn’t enough to cater for the demand of better healthcare services.
The Baleh Dam construction has begins and at its height of construction over the next ten years some four thousand workers are expected to work at the construction site.
People here are expecting the hospital to provide better healthcare to cover more services Kapit has sacrificed a lot over the years to construct dams to light up the state. Kapit the powerhouse of the state to propel the state industrialisation agenda with Bakun Dam (2400 MW), Murum Dam (900 MW) and proposed Baleh Dam (1300 MW), would surely make Kapit to deserve the attention of the government and the MOH to build a new hospital to provide up-to-date healthcare services to the people.
