Dr Manal Omar with a patient

Matron with a junior doctor

When I started raising money for the kidney and transplant patients locally, I wanted to match this by supporting transplant patients in Khartoum, Sudan. This was a way of expressing my appreciation to a Sudanese doctor, Khalid Ali, who Frank and I got to know on Frank’s penultimate visit to hospital before he died. I will always be grateful for the way Khalid supported and helped me during the weeks following Frank’s death.

I have visited Khartoum with Khalid and met his family. Khalid now works in Sussex and he is married to Mei and they have two children, Mustapha and Marwan, I am very happy that we remain friends and are still in regular contact.

I was able to despatch two dialysis machines to the Salma Dialysis Centre because they were less expensive than I had anticipated.

On 23 January 2008, Dr Melanie Newport visited the Salma Dialysis Centre and she was able to report that there is a plaque to identify the two dialysis machines which I donated in 2006. These are in a new ward which was only partly completed when i visited. This ward has 17 dialysis machines and runs three sessions a day and serves around 200 patients. I was told when I visited that the dialysis machines I sent would very probably be dedicated for patients with hepatitis infections. The old ward had nine dialysis machines and ran two sessions a day from 8.00am to 10.00pm for 18 patients.

From what Melanie could gather not much is known about the causes of renal disease in Sudan but patients present with small, non-functioning kidneys. There are no biopsy facilities and patients have to fund their own medication.

The Centre is named after Dr Salma Sulieman Mohammed who with her daughter, died in a boating accident on the Nile while celebrating the wedding of a colleague. There were no survivors.  I met Dr Salma’s sister who works at a local university.