Lions charity centre helps ease the burden on kidney patients

For patients and their families, coping with kidney failure can have financial as well as physical repercussions.

They are faced with having to pay HK$8,000 a week every week for two haemodialysis sessions at private hospitals. Fortunately, for patients like Li Chiu, 88, help is at hand thanks to the subsidised dialysis centre run by the Lions Kidney Educational Centre and Research Foundation.

Haemodialysis is preferred to cheaper peritoneal dialysis because it is more effective and reduces the risk of infection. But public hospitals only offer haemodialysis to patients who have suffered complications with peritoneal dialysis.

Li spends every Saturday and Wednesday morning undergoing haemodialysis at the Lions' centre in Sham Shui Po, which offers the treatment at less than a quarter of the price private hospitals charge.

"The doctor said haemodialysis was the only option for me," Li says in a faint voice.

His 84-year-old wife, who made the half-hour walk from Mong Kok to Sham Shui Po so she could collect Li without spending the HK$2 bus fare, adds: "Even with [financial] support from almost all of my five children, we have to scrimp and save because his sessions here still cost more than HK$120,000 a year.

"If he didn't get a place here, we'd have been left with no choice but to send him to hospital only when his health got really bad," she adds.