Kidney care in Seychelles

A small country carrying a very heavy kidney burden.

Seychelles has one of the heaviest per-person dialysis loads anywhere in the world. It also has unusually good national data about why, because the Ministry of Health has run population health surveys since 1989 and the most recent one measured kidney function directly.

This page sets out what that data actually says, what is documented about kidney services here, and, just as importantly, what is not. Where something has never been published, we say so plainly and tell you who to ask, rather than filling the gap with a plausible-sounding invention.

What the national data shows

All of the figures below come from the Ministry of Health's National Survey of Noncommunicable Diseases 2023, published in April 2024. It sampled 1,205 adults aged 18 to 74, drawn at random from the census, and measured kidney function from blood tests rather than asking people whether they had kidney disease.

230

people were on haemodialysis in Seychelles in 2023

The national figure, not an estimate, in a population of roughly 100,000.

3.6%

of adults aged 18 to 74 had moderate or severe kidney function decline, or kidney failure

Roughly 2,500 people. Measured by blood test, not self-reported.

of both women and men aged 55 to 74 had moderate or severe chronic kidney disease

Kidney disease in Seychelles is concentrated in later life, as it is everywhere.

Under 1 in 3

of people with raised risk factors had them controlled to treatment targets

This, more than anything else, is the story of why the dialysis unit is full.

The honest causal story

It is not that Seychelles fails to find hypertension and diabetes. Among adults aged 45 to 74, between 70% and 90% of those with high blood pressure or diabetes knew they had it, and over 80% of those who knew were on medication. Detection is working.

It is that among those being treated, only about 40% of high blood pressure and about 30% of diabetes was controlled to target. Overall, fewer than one in three people with raised risk factors had them controlled. High blood pressure reaches 77% of people aged 55 to 74, and diabetes around 30%.

Kidneys pay for that over decades. The Ministry's report attributes the large end-stage kidney disease burden directly to the population prevalence of hypertension and diabetes, with substantial proportions of them not treated to recommended targets.

Not everyone got here through diabetes

Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, an inherited condition, was estimated at 57 cases per 100,000 in Seychelles (Yersin, Bovet et al., 1997, cited in the 2023 Ministry report). The absolute number is small, but many people with it progress to kidney failure, and the report notes it contributes a substantial share of the patients who end up needing haemodialysis. In the 2023 survey, one of the four dialysis patients picked up in the sample had it.

It matters because of the assumption it corrects. Kidney failure in Seychelles is not only a story about lifestyle, and nobody on dialysis should be made to feel that it is.

The trajectory that shapes the service

1990

renal patients

2013

100

renal patients

2019

178

on dialysis (173 Mahe, 4 Praslin, 1 La Digue)

2023

230

on haemodialysis

Sources: Seychelles News Agency (1990 and 2013 figures), Ministry of Health and Seychelles News Agency (2019), Ministry of Health National NCD Survey (2023). We have not extrapolated this line forward, and neither should anyone else: the most recent verified figure is 230, in 2023.

Where the data is genuinely thin

We say this plainly because a health site that only tells you what it knows is not being straight with you. There is no published Seychelles renal registry that we could find. That means no published figures for how many people start dialysis each year, no breakdown of what caused their kidney failure, no survival data, and no transplant data. The 2023 survey is the best source available, and it does not contain those things.

So when this site is silent on something you would expect it to know, that silence is usually deliberate.

Getting care in Seychelles

Everything in this section comes from the Ministry of Health, the UK Foreign Office list of medical facilities, the national news agency, or the provider's own website. Nothing here is our own inference.

The hospital

The main referral hospital is Seychelles Hospital, at Mont Fleuri, Mahe. The Ministry of Health lists its telephone number as +248 4388000.

A naming trap worth knowing.The Ministry calls it Seychelles Hospital. The dialysis provider's website calls the same Mont Fleuri site Victoria Hospital. Both names are in print, and they are the same place. If you are told two different names, you are not being sent to two different hospitals.

The dialysis service

AMSA Healthcare, trading as AMSA Renal Care, has managed haemodialysis services in Seychelles since 2015. Its own website states that it manages the entire renal care sector and is the only facility offering haemodialysis treatments in Seychelles. The Seychelles News Agency reports that it has held the contract since March 2015.

Haemodialysis unit, Mahe

AMSA Renal Care, Haemodialysis Unit, Seychelles Hospital, Mont Fleuri, Mahe.
Telephone: +248 4388284 or +248 4388157.

Haemodialysis unit, Praslin

AMSA Renal Care Praslin, Baie Ste Anne Hospital, Praslin.
Telephone: +248 2824437.

According to AMSA's own website, the Mahe site has 40 dedicated haemodialysis beds and the Praslin site has 3. It also states that isolation rooms are available for patients with hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV and COVID, that it uses B. Braun machines with reverse osmosis water treatment, and that dialysers are single-use. We report these as the provider's claims, because that is what they are: they are not independently confirmed, and the Praslin bed count may be out of date.

What the state pays

The Ministry's 2023 report costs haemodialysis at roughly three sessions a week at about USD 220 per session, totalling around USD 7 million a year nationally. Separately, the Seychelles News Agency reported that the President negotiated the cost per session down from USD 250 to USD 175 during an official visit to the UAE.

These are state procurement costs. They are not what a patient pays, and they are certainly not what a visitor would be quoted. We include them because they tell you something real about the scale of the burden on a small country, not because they are a price list. If you need a price, the only reliable one is the figure the unit gives you directly.

What we do not know, and will not pretend to

The gaps are the most useful thing on this page

You will find websites that state Seychelles dialysis prices, opening hours and booking terms with total confidence. We looked for the sources behind those claims, properly, and they are not there.

Here is our list of what is genuinely not documented by any authoritative source. We publish it because an honest gap is more useful to you than a confident invention: you can act on a gap by asking the right question, but a made-up opening hour will just waste a journey, and a made-up price could wreck a holiday budget.

Whether the renal unit accepts visiting, holiday or tourist dialysis patients at all.
The booking lead time for a visiting patient.
The price per session for a visiting patient.
Whether there is spare capacity for visitors, and whether that changes with the season.
Session times, shift patterns and opening hours.
Whether visiting patients who are hepatitis B or hepatitis C positive can be accommodated.
Whether the unit will provide written confirmation of routine virus surveillance to a referring home unit.
Whether peritoneal dialysis exists in Seychelles in any form.
Whether peritoneal dialysis fluids can be shipped to and imported into Seychelles.
Whether there is any kidney transplant programme, or any overseas transplant referral pathway.
Any dialysis capability on La Digue.
Whether nephrologist cover is available on-island, and what the out-of-hours arrangements are.
A booking email address for the renal unit. Only telephone numbers are published anywhere.
Current patient numbers. The most recent verified figure is 230, in 2023.

So what do you actually do?

Contact the renal unit at Seychelles Hospital directly, or speak to your GP or the Ministry of Health about the current arrangements. If you live in Seychelles, your own doctor is the right first call. These are the questions worth having written down before you ring.

Am I able to be seen here, and at which site: Mahe or Praslin?
What do you need from my doctor or my home unit, and by when?
What is the cost, in what currency, and how is it paid?
What are your session times, and can they fit around my life?
What happens out of hours, and is there a nephrologist available?
What do I do if I become unwell between sessions?

If you are visiting Seychelles rather than living here, the questions are different and there are more of them. We have written the whole visitor process up separately.

Visiting Seychelles on dialysis?

Holiday dialysis is a clinical handover, not a booking.

We cannot tell you what the Seychelles unit charges a visitor, or whether it takes them, because nobody has published it. What we can give you is everything else: the lead times, the exact paperwork your home unit must send, an interactive checklist, a message you can copy and send to a unit, and the one question about virus surveillance that can cost you six months on the transplant list if you get it wrong.

Open the visitor dialysis planner

Living with dialysis in a tropical climate

Almost all renal advice is written for temperate countries. It does not address the heat, it does not address the sun at this latitude, and it certainly does not address the food that is actually on the table in Seychelles. This section does.

Heat and fluid

Your fluid allowance does not automatically go up because you are hot, or because you are on a beach.

Kidney Care UK is explicit that there is no one-size-fits-all advice for dialysis patients on fluid intake in hot weather. It depends on how much kidney function you have left and how much fluid you gain between sessions. Some people will be told to loosen their allowance in the heat. Some will not.

We are not going to give you a number, and you should distrust any website that does. Your allowance is set by your kidney team, for you, from your results. Have that conversation with them before you travel, or before the hot season, rather than working it out on the beach.

Never change your fluid restriction, your diuretics or your blood pressure medicines on your own, even in extreme heat. This is not caution for its own sake. Both mistakes are dangerous, in opposite directions.

Heat cuts both ways

Sweating on top of the fluid the machine takes off can tip you into dehydration, low blood pressure, cramping or fainting. But drinking to thirst in tropical heat can tip you the other way, into fluid overload: breathlessness, swelling of the face and ankles, high blood pressure, headaches and exhaustion. Both are real, and which way you tip is individual.

Signs of dehydration to watch for

Dizziness, light-headedness, fatigue, a dry mouth, lips or tongue, sunken eyes, and dark urine if you still pass any. If you are getting these, tell your unit. Do not simply start drinking more and hope.

Managing thirst without adding fluid

The single most effective lever is salt. As NIDDK puts it, too much sodium makes you thirsty, which makes you drink more liquid. Cut the salt and you will want to drink less, which is far easier than trying to want it less by willpower.

Beyond that: cold or frozen fruit chosen for low potassium, sugar-free hard sweets or gum, and a spray bottle to mist your mouth. And remember what counts as fluid, because a resort is full of it: soup, ice, ice cream, sorbet, jelly, yoghurt, and high-water fruit such as melon, grapes and oranges. Iced drinks and fruit platters are exactly the trap.

Sun and skin

Seychelles is equatorial, and this deserves more attention than it usually gets. Cover up, wear a hat and good sunglasses, use a high-factor sunscreen, and keep your medicines out of the heat, because storage matters and Kidney Care UK specifically flags it.

An important distinction that is often blurred

If you have had a kidney transplant and take anti-rejection medicines, your skin cancer risk is dramatically higher: Kidney Care UK cites roughly 100 times the risk for squamous cell carcinoma, 6 times for basal cell carcinoma and 4 times for melanoma. The advice for transplant recipients is factor 50 or above, all year round, protective clothing, hats, and no sunbathing or sunbeds at all.

Those figures apply to transplant recipients on immunosuppression, not to people on dialysis generally. We keep the two separate deliberately, because blurring them would either frighten one group unnecessarily or leave the other group under-protected. Sun sense is for everyone. That specific, dramatic risk is not.

If you are immunosuppressed, also ask your team about live vaccines before you travel, and about which travel immunisations you should have.

The food that is actually on the table

Potassium is the sharp end of this. NIDDK is direct about why: potassium levels can rise between haemodialysis sessions and affect your heartbeat, and eating too much potassium can be dangerous to your heart and may even cause death. Yet the standard renal diet sheet lists potatoes and bananas, and says nothing whatsoever about breadfruit, cassava or coconut.

The figures below are potassium content per 100 g, from the USDA FoodData Central database, retrieved on 13 July 2026. They are measured values, not our estimates.

Higher potassium: the local foods to be careful with

Potassium content per 100 grams of higher-potassium foods common in Seychelles
Food	Potassium (mg per 100 g)
Breadfruit seeds, raw	941
Avocado, raw (California)	507
Breadfruit, raw	490
Banana, raw	358
Coconut meat, raw	356
Avocado, raw (Florida)	351
Cassava, raw	271
Coconut milk, raw (from grated meat and water)	263
Coconut water, from the nut	250
Coconut water, ready-to-drink, unsweetened	165

Lower potassium: the safer local choices

Potassium content per 100 grams of lower-potassium fruit common in Seychelles
Food	Potassium (mg per 100 g)
Papaya, raw	182
Mango, raw	168
Pineapple, raw	109 to 137

This is the genuinely good news, and it is worth saying loudly: papaya, mango and pineapple are all lower in potassium than banana, and pineapple is notably low. There is fruit here you can enjoy.

Coconut is the headline warning

Coconut water is sold everywhere as a natural health drink. For someone on dialysis it is a double hit: it is a fluid, and it is a potassium load. At 250 mg per 100 g straight from the nut, a single large coconut is a meaningful dose of potassium on top of your fluid allowance. Coconut milk in a curry does the same thing invisibly, because you cannot see it on the plate.

Breadfruit and cassava are high-potassium staples

They are traditional Seychellois carbohydrates, and they appear on no temperate-country renal diet sheet. Breadfruit at 490 mg per 100 g is in avocado territory, and breadfruit seeds are higher still. This is exactly the kind of thing a diet sheet written in London will never tell you.

Fish is excellent protein, and it is not free of potassium or phosphorus

NIDDK recommends high-quality protein such as fish for people on haemodialysis, because it produces less waste, and protein matters enormously on dialysis. But fish is also on the list of naturally high-phosphorus foods. Yellowfin tuna, raw, contains about 441 mg of potassium and 278 mg of phosphorus per 100 g, and cooked it is higher still, at about 527 mg and 333 mg. Tuna is a good choice. Portion size still matters.

Two practical warnings for self-catering and restaurants

NIDDK advises that people on haemodialysis usually have only about half a cup of milk a day, because of the phosphorus. And avoid salt substitutes: many of them are potassium chloride, which is precisely the wrong thing. In a kitchen that is not your own, or a restaurant, that substitute may already be in the food.

Boiling helps, and we will not give you a percentage

Boiling vegetables and starchy staples in plenty of water and throwing the water away leaches potassium out of them. This is standard renal dietetic practice and it applies directly to breadfruit and cassava. We are not going to publish a figure for how much it removes, because we could not verify one for these foods, and a made-up number here could genuinely hurt someone. Ask your dietitian for the specifics.

How to use this section

These are food composition values, not a diet plan, and they are not permission or prohibition. Your potassium and phosphate allowances are individual: they depend on your blood results, your remaining kidney function and your dialysis. Modern guidance has deliberately moved away from blanket restriction lists, because those lists cause malnutrition, and malnutrition harms more people on dialysis than an occasional high-potassium meal does.

Use this to have a better conversation with a renal dietitian, specifically, not a general one. Take this page, take your blood results, and take an honest food diary. Then you can work out together what you can actually eat, which is a far better question than what you must avoid.

Our guides cover diet, fluid and the treatment options in more depth, and the glossary explains any word here that was new.

Seychelles is not an outlier: the Indian Ocean picture

This matters for two reasons. It tells you that the burden here is regional rather than a local failure, and it tells you what to expect from services across these islands.

Mauritius

At the end of 2020: 1,578 people on haemodialysis and just 1 on peritoneal dialysis. Dialysis prevalence of 1,248 per million population, which puts Mauritius in the top 15 countries in the world. The Renal Association of Mauritius states plainly that there is currently no transplant service in Mauritius.

Kidney360, 2021

Maldives

267 dialysis patients, 704 per million population, across 11 public centres. There are 250 patients on haemodialysis and none at all on peritoneal dialysis. Transplantation is done abroad, in India or Sri Lanka, funded by the national insurance scheme. There is no domestic transplant programme.

Kidney360, 2023

Reunion

Kidney failure prevalence in Reunion, as in other French overseas territories, runs at more than twice that of mainland France. That is a high-income, well-registered health system in the same ocean, which points at population risk rather than at a failing health service.

French REIN registry

The regional through-line

Across the Indian Ocean islands, haemodialysis dominates, peritoneal dialysis is rare to non-existent, and domestic kidney transplantation is largely absent, which means transplant usually means flying out. What Seychelles specifically does about transplantation is not documented in any source we could find, and we are not going to guess. Ask your kidney team directly what the pathway is.

When to seek urgent help

Some things cannot wait until your next session. If you recognise yourself here, act now.

Call your local emergency number now

Bleeding from your fistula, graft or catheter that will not stop with firm, continuous pressure
Blood loss from a dialysis access can be rapid and life-threatening. Press hard, do not let go, and call for help.
Chest pain or tightness, or pain spreading to the arm or jaw
This can be a heart attack. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in people on dialysis.
Severe breathlessness, especially lying flat, waking up gasping, or coughing pink frothy sputum
Fluid on the lungs. This can be fatal and may need urgent dialysis.
Collapse, fainting, a seizure, or new confusion
Could be a dangerous drop in blood pressure, a dangerous potassium level, a stroke, or dialysis disequilibrium.
Palpitations with dizziness, or a very slow or very irregular pulse, especially after a missed session
Suggests a high potassium level or an abnormal heart rhythm. Severe hyperkalaemia can stop the heart.
Sudden weakness or numbness of the face, arm or leg on one side, or sudden trouble speaking or seeing
This can be a stroke. People on dialysis are at high risk, and treatment is time-critical.

Contact your dialysis unit today

The thrill (the buzz you can feel over your fistula or graft) is weak or gone
The access may be clotting. This is time-critical and it may still be saved if it is treated within hours.
Fever, shaking chills, or suddenly feeling very unwell, especially if you have a catheter
This can be a bloodstream infection. Catheters carry the highest infection risk of any access.
Cloudy drained fluid, tummy pain, fever, nausea or vomiting on peritoneal dialysis
Treat this as peritonitis until proven otherwise. Do not wait, and bring the drained bag with you.
Redness, heat, swelling, tenderness, pus or discharge at any access or exit site
An access or exit-site infection needs to be seen, not watched.

There are more warning signs than these, covering your access, your fluid and your mood. See the full list on the patient hub.

This list is general information, not a diagnosis. It cannot cover everything, and it does not replace your kidney team. If something feels wrong and it is not on this list, ring the unit anyway.

Sources

National Survey of Noncommunicable Diseases in Seychelles 2023 (Seychelles Heart Study V), published April 2024 (Ministry of Health, Seychelles, 2024)
Seychelles hospitals list (Ministry of Health, Seychelles)
New Dialysis Unit opens at Seychelles Hospital, 12 April 2019 (Ministry of Health, Seychelles, 2019)
Seychelles Hospital increases dialysis services to cater for additional patients (Seychelles News Agency)
AMSA Renal Care, and AMSA Healthcare contact page (AMSA Healthcare, retrieved 13 July 2026)
List of medical facilities in Seychelles, last updated 8 January 2025 (UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, 2025)
Frequency and impact of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease in the Seychelles (Yersin C, Bovet P et al., Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 1997;12:2069, 1997)
Global Dialysis Perspective: Mauritius (Kidney360, 2021)
Global Dialysis Perspective: Maldives (Kidney360, 2023)
Nephrology and dialysis services in Mauritius (Renal Association of Mauritius)
FoodData Central (Foundation and SR Legacy datasets) (USDA, retrieved 13 July 2026)
Living with CKD: stay safe in the heat and in the sun (Kidney Care UK)
Eating and Nutrition for Hemodialysis (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK))