Self-Care Therapies

Self-care dialysis therapies include peritoneal dialysis and all forms of home hemodialysis (short daily, long nocturnal, every other day and every other night).  These treatments are growing in popularity due to the fact that they offer patients a number of important benefits:

• Clinical research demonstrates that more frequent dialysis provides patients with improved health outcomes such as reduced hospitalizations and improved mortality rates.
• More frequent treatments provide greater freedom with fluid intake and diet.
• Self-care treatments are designed to be administered at home, at work or on vacation, offering patients convenience, flexibility and independence.

Below is a brief overview of WellBound's self-care dialysis therapies offerings.

Peritoneal Dialysis
Today's most widely utilized self-care modality, peritoneal dialysis (PD) offers a number of critical advantages to patients. As a continuous therapy, PD avoids fluctuations in patients' physiology and fluid load, improving blood pressure control and lessens cardiovascular stress. Additionally, no blood leaves the body during PD, eliminating the need for vascular access. This allows patients to perform their treatments almost anywhere while offering other critical mobility and convenience advantages. As a result, PD is particularly well-suited for patients beginning dialysis.
 
WellBound's “Centers of Excellence” offer both forms of PD therapy, continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) and automated peritoneal dialysis (APD).  While there are a number of CAPD regimens available, patients typically conduct daily exchanges every four-to-six waking hours and once prior to going to sleep. With APD, the exchanges are usually done during the night with the aid of a small machine (cycler) that requires little patient interaction. As with nocturnal hemodialysis, this leaves the patient free during the day.

Daily Home Hemodialysis: Short Daily and Long Nocturnal Dialysis
Home hemodialysis allows patients to dialyze more frequently and for longer periods of time than traditional in-center hemodialysis. Patients may dialyze under a variety of different time and blood flow parameters, providing them with more independence than conventional in-center dialysis and allowing them to play a central role in their care. As a home-based therapy, self-care hemodialysis reduces the risk of transmission of blood borne diseases, eliminates travel time to centers, and affords patients significant increases in schedule flexibility.

Since daily home hemodialysis (both short daily and long nocturnal) most closely resembles normal kidney function patients also receive significant clinical advantages including reduced hospitalizations, fewer intradialytic complications, a reduction in blood pressure medications and Epogen, and fewer restrictions in diet and fluid intake parameters.

With short daily home hemodialysis, patients typically dialyze six days a week for approximately one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours and with long nocturnal home hemodialysis patients dialyze while they sleep for approximately seven-to-ten hours, six nights a week.

Back to top