Doctors will be able to harvest kidneys from fresh corpses if parliament passes a proposed law that will operationalise the Health Act.
With the law in place, it will allow Kenyans to donate their body parts upon death either in writing or an oral statement.
“We also hope we can change the law to extract from friends, but we don’t want to open a Pandora's box where people can buy kidneys. When the [proposed] bill is up we can harvest from dead people,” Head of renal unit at KNH Dr. John Ngigi stated.
The Star reports that the Ministry of Health statistics indicated that only 466 patients have undergone kidney transplant since 2006 in public and private hospitals.
On its part, NHIF reveals that over 4300 Kenyans were undergoing dialysis in around 151 centers in Kenya.
It was also reported that most people undergo the dialysis after the donors pulled out in the last minute or were disqualified on the basis of poor lifestyle choices which make them predisposed to chronic diseases like diabetes.
In 2018, KNH announced that the waiting list for kidney transplants had over 2000 people but the hospital only conducts a mere 15 transplants a year.
Dr. Ngigi, who was speaking at the KNH during a briefing on the ongoing donor-supported orthopedic and kidney transplant project, revealed that most people opt for dialysis rather than transplant as NHIF does not pay for the lifetime medication in immunosuppressants.
“It makes more sense for NHIF to pay for immunosuppressants so we move many people from dialysis to transplant,” the consultant added.
NHIF pays Ksh 500,000 for the transplant but not for the after-medication which requires around Ksh 40,000 per month.
Without the medication, the body rejects the new kidney and most patients have to go back to dialysis.
