(photo by Susan Urmy)
A delegation of government and health officials from Jamaica visited the Vanderbilt Kidney Dialysis Center last week to take posession of 16 dialysis machines donated by VUMC’s Division of Nephrology and Department of Medicine. On hand were, from left: VUMC’s Richard Phidd; Professor Gordon Shirley, Jamaica’s Ambassador to the United States; Hopeton Falconer, M.D., chief of Mandeville Regional Hospital, LV Kingston, Jamaica; and VUMC’s Angie Rogers. Also present was Everard Barton, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of West Indies/Mona Campus. The machines are sorely needed in Jamaica, where there is an ongoing lack of access to life-saving kidney dialysis, due primarily to a shortage of available dialysis machines. It is estimated that at any given time there are as many as 700 citizens of the island nation, many of them children, who do not have access to dialysis.