Participants: 88 of 101 unfunded patients presenting to the ED during the study period consented to participate, resulting in an 87.1% response rate. 65 of these patients were undocumented immigrants.
Main Outcome Measures:Quantitative scores for the 5 subscales of the KDQOL-36 were calculated for the study population.
Results:Measures of physical and mental health in our study population were lower than those published for scheduled dialysis patients. 79.5% of our patients lost employment due to their dialysis requirements. At least 71.4% of the study patients were unaware that they required dialysis before immigrating to the United States.Conclusions: Quality of life scores were found to be low among our population of undocumented emergent dialysis patients. Our data also provide some evidence that availability of dialysis at no cost is not a primary driver of illegal immigration of ESRD patients to the United States. Ethn
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