a procedureDialysis away from home

A person on maintenance haemodialysis books sessions at a unit somewhere else and goes there. The treatment is the one they already have: needles into a fistula or a line, four hours on a machine, three times a week, indefinitely. What travels with them is a prescription — dry weight, dialysate composition, heparin, machine settings — and a set of virology results the receiving unit will want before it agrees to a slot.

This is the long-stay, non-surgical end of cross-border care and it inverts the usual story. Nobody here is buying an operation that is cheaper abroad. They are buying the ability to leave home for a fortnight, and the price of that is six or eight dialysis sessions bought retail in a country where they are not insured.

What gets published is the session. Bangkok Hospital Phuket runs a department called the Holiday Dialysis Center and states its rates: 7,000 baht a session of four hours for conventional haemodialysis, 8,000 for online haemodiafiltration, both excluding medications. Vibhavadi Hospital in Bangkok publishes a domestic figure on the same kind of page: 2,200 baht a session, 3,400 for a first session including the nephrologist, 1,200 to open a dialyser and 4,700 for a session in intensive care, with the same exclusion of medications and any additional diagnosis. Inference — the two numbers are not the same product bought at two prices. One is a department built to take booked foreign patients with interpreters and a concierge; the other is a hospital's standard outpatient rate. But a traveller reading only the first has no idea the second exists, and the comparison is the kind a directory can make and a clinic page cannot.

In Europe the price is frequently not a price at all, because entitlement gets there first: a UK agency page listing Spanish units notes that most accept the European Health Insurance Card or its UK successor. Where they do not, it quotes a private unit in Benidorm at 450 euro a session. The same agency lists Turkish units at roughly 220 to 300 euro a session, some with transport to the resort included and one explicitly cheaper without it. Those are an intermediary's numbers, not a unit's own price list, and they are labelled as such here.

The largest chain publishes no prices whatsoever. Fresenius Medical Care's NephroCare runs a holiday dialysis service and routes it through the patient's home centre: the booking is made by the unit that already treats them, which is also the arrangement that gets the prescription transmitted correctly.

Trade practice — a unit asks for the dialysis prescription, recent hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV serology, and confirmation of who pays, before it confirms a slot; isolation machines are limited and a positive result can mean no slot at all rather than a higher price. Sessions in a resort in August are booked out months ahead for the same reason hotel rooms are.

Booked ahead, session by session, usually through the home unit and sometimes through an agency that holds slots at named units. The receiving unit repeats what it needs: weight, bloods, machine settings, and a signature. Payment is per session and in advance at most private units; within the EU an entitlement card may replace payment entirely, and where it does the transaction leaves no price behind at all. What is not bought in a session is the rest of the care — the medication, the pathology, the access problem that arrives on day three, the admission if it does not resolve.

As of 17 September 2026 four countries' published per-session figures were read for this record: two Thai hospitals' own pages, an agency's numbers for Spain and Türkiye, and a US federal tariff. They are four different kinds of document. The American one is the only rate in the set set by a payer rather than a seller: the Medicare base rate for one dialysis treatment, 281.71 dollars from 1 January 2026, covering a bundle that includes the drugs the Thai pages exclude.

This page describes a treatment and reports published prices. It is not medical advice, and nothing here says whether anybody should travel.