Department of urology at Islamabad medical and dental college/Akbar Niazi teaching hospital Islamabad at Satra meal Murree Road has started minimally invasive treatment of urolithiasis at a very affordable cost. The salient feature of this ongoing program is PCNL and Mini-PCNL, that is the removal any size of stone from the kidney through one small hole of 6-8 mm size and the patient can be discharged within 24 hours of the procedure. PCNL is the gold standard treatment for large stones, more than 2 cm across the globe. But unfortunately this facility is not available free of cost in our all public hospitals due to unavailability of the expertise and equipments and patients can not afford procedure in private hospitals at very high cost. As a result more than 80% of our patients with stones undergo open surgery with large incision and high morbidity. In the developed world only less than 1% patients undergo open surgery.
At IMDC and ANTH, we are also trying to add facility for ESWL, which will be very useful for patients with kidney stones less than 2 cm in size, as 70-80% of patients can be stone free within a period of 3 month with ESWL.
All ureteric stones up-to 1 cm size, can pass with medicine and those not passed can be removed endoscopically and we are already providing all these facilities at ANTH.