The National Kidney Foundation (N.K.F.) will be relocate at the end of August this year to the building that previously housed the National Health Service's Pharmaceutical and Laboratory Services.

This was confirmed by the N.K.F. general manager Mulipola Lose Hazelman in an interview with the Samoa Observer.

He said a water treatment plant had been ordered from Germany, but it is taking time and they are currently putting out tenders for local companies to renovate the new premises. 

“We have to order a water treatment plant from Germany and that takes time but at the moment we are tendering local companies to conduct renovations.

“There will be 64 stations compared to the 22 stations which we have here at our current location and this relocation will help our services in meeting the increasing demand for the services,” he said. 

Mulipola said the Foundation's current patient roster are aged between 25-40 and currently have a total of 130 patients. 

“At the moment we have a total of 130 patients but we have 30 new additional patients every year but then we lose people along the way because of cardiac arrest.

“One of the problems we face is that we cannot conduct kidney transplants because we do not have any donors. Our priority at the moment is management of people who have chronic kidney disease before they reach the dialysis treatment,” he added.

The Foundation is currently pushing for them to manage chronic kidney disease through their weekly screenings, though Mulipola indicated that while they have pre-registered 500 people with Stage 3 kidney failure, only 50 show up at their pre-dialysis clinics. 

“We have found people that are referred to our pre-dialysis but do not show up there is nothing we can do, but at the moment we have 500 pre-registered people with stage 3 of kidney failure and roughly only 50 show up for the pre-dialysis clinics, which is a great concern we want to try and fix the problem before it reaches dialysis stage."

According to a survey that was done in 2013, about 23 per cent of Samoa's population are diabetic, he added. 

“There was a survey conducted in 2013 and about 23 per cent of our population is diabetic but 80 per cent of people who come to dialysis are the unmanaged diabetes.”