As of this week, there will no longer be a wait list for dialysis at the Charles S. Curtis Memorial Hospital, according to Julie Nicholas, chief operating officer for the southern part of the region and vice president of acute care services for the whole region of Labrador-Grenfell Health.

As of May 15, the unit is open six days a week, and by the end of this month, will be accommodating 15 patients.

“The unit started in December of 2007. At that time, we had only one patient on dialysis,” Ms. Nicholas said, adding the demand for dialysis has increased throughout the province. “Now by the end of this month we will have 15 patients on dialysis so that is how much we’ve grown and how fast.”

Within Labrador-Grenfell Health, she added, there are also dialysis units in Happy Valley-Goose Bay and Labrador City, so the unit at Charles S. Curtis Memorial Hospital is serving the tip of the Northern Peninsula.

According to the Department of Health and Community Services, in Budget 2011-12, approximately $301,500 was allocated to enhance dialysis services in St. Anthony.

“This funding was used for staffing, operating costs and the installation of a water treatment system,” a spokesperson said. “This investment will allow the St. Anthony dialysis unit to accommodate six additional dialysis patients. As a result, the four patients that were on the waitlist are now being accommodated in St. Anthony, leaving additional capacity for up to three more patients if or when required.”

The funding, Ms. Nicholas said, allowed them to gain an extra register nurse (RN) and licenced practical nurse (LPN), “which enabled us to expand, because you have to have the right staffing to go along with the number of patients.”

Currently, the unit has four RNs, three LPNs and one unit co-ordinator.

“There was also money in the budget for a water treatment unit and we don’t have that installed yet, but the contract has been awarded…and we are not working on planning to get that piece of equipment in,” Ms. Nicholas said. “Right now what we have is individual water treatment systems with each of our machines. What this does, it replaces that and you have a clean water source going in to all the machines, so less maintenance on the machines, and so on. It will be a better service because we will have less down time for our machines.”

Prior to the middle of May, the unit was opened three days a week - Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.

“So what the expansion has brought, is now we are open six days a week,” Ms. Nicholas said, adding the only day the unit is not open now is Sunday.

“The new patients now will be getting a service on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday,” Ms. Nicholas said.

“We are taking clients off the wait list. We’ve had four clients on the waitlist for months and months and the last of those four will be accommodated by (this) week. We’re really pleased with that.”

Ms. Nicholas explained that most clients are on three-days-a-week treatments, on a schedule, for instance, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Currently, the unit is operating two runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday, helping 12 clients between 8 a.m.-8 p.m., and one run 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

The unit is a satellite service, Ms. Nicholas added, and clients have to be considered stable to be treated in Charles S. Curtis Memorial Hospital, so not all clients from the area could get dialysis at the hospital.

The unit could possibly take 18 clients now, but it would depend on a number of factors, including scheduling and staffing ability, she said.

“As new people come needing the service, we will look at how we can provide that,” Ms. Nicholas said.

“It’s been a long time coming; this expansion, and clients have had to wait. We are all about patient safety, doing service right, so it has been a bit of a wait to make sure that we have everything in place but I think clients will be pleased to be getting home. It’s all about getting clients closer to home for this service.”

An empty wait list was happy news for Christopher Mitchelmore, NDP MHA for The Straits-White Bay North, as well.

“Hopefully we are all a level where everything is quite stable right now because there are a number of people that depend on this vital service and it’s absolutely needed for people that require dialysis can’t travel a significant distance as they need to be close to the service,” Mr. Mitchelmore said. “What we’ve seen is we’ve seen people relocated to Goose Bay and to St. John’s for months on end to be displaced from their family and from community members, some of them had to uproot, their spouse traveled with them. But we’re certainly quite pleased that Labrador Grenfell Health is expanding the service, something that was promised in 2011.”

Government has been putting a lot of money into dialysis across the province, he said, and he hopes the same is being done at the other sites, “that we’re actually capitalizing and getting the maximum amount of people receiving the service.”

“There have been quite a number of months since I have been elected that we’ve been pressing dialysis issues that we’ve been hearing from our constituents, that we’ve been hearing from different committees, to look at how we can improve the service and it’s something that we’ve been watching quite closely, monitoring, and having discussions with the varying levels, whether it be at the Labrador Grenfell Health or whether it be through the Department of Health and Community Services. We’ll be continuing to press this issue and monitor and follow it to ensure that the people that need the service are getting it. We want to see it get up to that level where they can take the 24 clients.”

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