Relief for Vaughan home dialysis patients takes step forward

Council has to ratify committee approval for financial assistance

Yorkregion.com
June 3, 2016
By Adam Martin-Robbins

Vaughan is poised to become just the third municipality in Ontario to offer financial assistance to people with chronic kidney disease who do home dialysis.

The city’s finance committee, on Monday, approved a staff recommendation to implement a program to provide home dialysis patients with funding, ranging between $460 and $650 annually depending on their water and wastewater usage.

The committee’s decision still has to be ratified by city council.

But Francesco Nardi, who raised the issue with Maple/Kleinburg Councillor Marilyn Iafrate during last year’s budget talks, is pleased.

“We’re one step ahead,” the 66-year-old, longtime Vaughan resident said Monday. “Anything helps, any relief. It costs me probably around $120 a month more, but (it will help).”

It’s rare, but not unheard of, for municipalities in Ontario to offer assistance to those doing home dialysis.

For instance, Clearview Township, just west of Barrie, provides a 90 per cent rebate on the amount of water their dialysis machine uses.

The City of Ottawa, meanwhile, has been providing annual grants ranging from $250 up to a maximum $500 depending on the amount of water used since 2007.

Last year, 13 people doing home dialysis in Ottawa received grants at a cost of $5,250 to the city.

Nardi, a longtime Vaughan resident, has seen his utility bill soar since starting home dialysis last November.

Some of his recent bills climbed to $950 every two months for hydro and water compared to highs of about $665 before.

He suffers from polycystic disease, a genetic disorder that causes cysts to form in his kidneys rendering them unable to function properly.

As a result, Nardi has to hook himself up to a dialysis machine, set up in his home office, for several hours every other day to do the work of his kidneys, which remove toxins from the blood.

The entire process, factoring in set up time and cleaning up afterward, takes him about six-and-a-half hours and it uses hundreds of litres of water an hour.

But Nardi opted to do dialysis at home rather than driving to a clinic or the hospital because it gives him greater flexibility.

His decision also saves the provincial government thousands of dollars, in part, because it reduces the need for hospital space and requires fewer health-care workers.

The cost to provide dialysis in a hospital or at a clinic has been pegged at about $83,000 per patient, per year, according to information published by the Kidney Foundation of Canada in 2013.

By contrast, home dialysis costs between $30,000 and $60,000, depending on the type of dialysis.

Nardi’s decision also benefits those who are unable to do home dialysis by freeing up space for them at clinics or hospitals.

Iafrate said those are a couple of the key reasons she asked city staff to look into the possibility creating a financial assistance program.

“I’m very happy to see that staff are recommending some form of financial relief for people like Mr. Nardi who are consuming an inordinate amount of water for doing dialysis at home rather than choosing to stay at a clinic where it would be paid for by the government,” Iafrate told her colleagues at the committee meeting.

In order to qualify for assistance under Vaughan’s proposed program, those with chronic kidney disease need to submit an application providing details of their water usage, a description of the dialysis machine they use as well as a letter from a medical professional or hospital confirming they’re undergoing home dialysis treatment and the duration of that treatment.

Staff estimate that the program, if approved unaltered, it will cost the city about $6,500 per year.