SAT hospital’s paediatric nephrology dept. achieves a major milestone

For the small team of faculty and postgraduate medicos at the Paediatric Nephrology department at SAT Hospital, the past few weeks have been quite hectic. The State’s only dedicated paediatric renal care centre celebrated its first-ever paediatric renal transplant on January 13, when one of its young end-stage renal disease patients was transplanted with a kidney from her paternal grandfather.

The team was conducting follow-up tests, monitoring the child and running outpatient (OP) clinic, when on Thursday (February 14, 2026) night Kerala State Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (K-SOTTO) authorities enquired if the department had any children on the emergency renal transplant list to receive two tiny kidneys from a deceased donor.

The 10-year-old girl, who received both kidneys of nine-month-old Aalin, the deceased donor, had been on maintenance haemodialysis at SAT hospital since the past one-and-a-half years

There are vascular, anatomical as well as surgical complications involved when adult kidneys are transplanted in children, especially in those who weigh less than 20 kg. The renal transplant on Friday was thus quite unusual, the donor being a young infant.

“We have 40 children on the transplant list now and many more on maintenance dialysis. There was a time when most of our young patients with renal failure used to die because we did not have a dialysis facility and most families could not afford maintenance dialysis outside. It was in 2006 that we finally had our dialysis unit. Today, there are also several government initiatives offering financial assistance to families for chronic illnesses, which has made a huge difference,” says Susan Uthup, who heads the Paediatric Nephrology department.

The two back-to-back paediatric renal transplants have thus been pivotal events as far as the department is concerned

From a single faculty unit, it has been a long journey for the Paediatric Nephrology department here, which today has a comprehensive kidney replacement therapy programme, 50 dedicated beds for paediatric renal patients and a 12-bed dialysis unit.

The department now offers a full range of renal treatment modalities for children, and has a specialised acute kidney injury follow-up clinic and now a transplant service. A referral centre for paediatric renal care in South India, it also runs a special programme for the early detection and management of congenital anomalies of kidney and urinary tract in children.

The recent postdoctoral (DM) program in paediatric nephrology, the only one in the public sector in the country, has been one of the biggest highlights of the clinical and academic excellence of the institution.

Key challenges

Children with severe kidney failure who are put on chronic dialysis face many challenges, the primary one being heart failure. Renal transplant is the definitive treatment for them.

"We had thus been working on building a paediatric renal transplant unit so that we can offer affordable and quality care to many families with chronically ill children.It is heartening that we can offer the best of care to our young renal patients,” Dr. Uthup says.