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Nurse Ruth discusses the support that is available to patients after in-home dialysis training.
Ruth:
We do provide support for home hemodialysis patients, in that, monthly they draw their blood at home and then it goes to our laboratory and we get the results back in-center.
We call and talk with them. We also have them come in-center once a month for our clinic visit with our doctor and support staff which is the dietician, social worker, the nurse and the physician.
Any questions or problems that they have they are welcome to bring up, they are welcome to call us at any time.
We are only as far away as a telephone and we do have a 24-hour, 7-day on-call service and those are answered by RNs.
When a person first goes home on dialysis there are a lot of things that can happen equipment-wise, just little questions in cannulating and maybe not getting the right flow they wanted or expecting to get.
If you call the nurse they can offer suggestions on how to improve that and that’s just one of the things and there’s alarms on the machines for specific things that happen like a clamp that might get left on, or air in the line, or bubbles or something that if you call right away the nurse will answer and help you walk through some of that.
There’s also other alarms on the machine that NxStage offers a technical support for, and I think that is more specific to the PureFlow probably than would be to the cycler. However, it’s available as well as the nurse on call.
About Ruth:
Ruth Gray, R.N., H.H.D., is a registered nurse affiliated with Southwest Kidney Dialysis in Tempe, Arizona. Ruth works with DaVita Tempe Dialysis in the home hemodialysis department, training patients to perform at-home dialysis.
Visit Nurse Ruth at DaVita Tempe Dialysis
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