Projects

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and ensuing lockdown imposed several challenges in providing care for patients with kidney failure. Difficulty in accessing a health-care facility, procuring disposables required for peritoneal dialysis (PD), financial and logistic hardships were a few of them. The impact of these challenges on the quality of health care provided has not been well documented in children on chronic dialysis from a resource-limited setting. To understand the impact of the challenges imposed by the pandemic on the care provided during the pandemic, we studied the rate and outcome of peritonitis as benchmarks for the care. We compared the incidence and outcome of peritonitis in children on continuous ambulatory PD (CAPD) during the COVID-19 pandemic to our center’s data from the previous year. This was a retrospective review of data which included children on CAPD from January 2019 to August 2021. Children with less than 3 months of follow-up and those with PD catheters inserted for acute dialysis were excluded.