At the moment, the Dundee unit is the only place in Tayside where patients with kidney failure can get life-saving blood cleansing.

This takes several hours and is required several times a week.

Adding the travel time to the treatment time means that several patients, many of whom are in their 70s and 80s, leave home early in the morning and don’t get home until late at night.

Over the years there have been regular pleas from desperate patients, their families and carers for a satellite unit to be built at Perth so patients could hook up to dialysis machines there.

But while bosses have always been outwardly sympathetic to the need, cash has not been made available.

Today, Audrey Warden, the Ninewells Hospital-based NHS Tayside manager with responsibility for critical care, said the satellite unit project group was in the very early stages of appointing an architectural team.

“It is likely to be on the site of the women and child clinic which I am really delighted about because it has got its own access which is really beneficial for dialysis whose patients require to be dropped off and picked up,” said Mrs Warden. “It is just a very, very rough estimate but we are looking for the satellite unit to be operational around mid 2006.”

In fact, the project still has to go through many hoops yet before renal patients from Perth and Perthshire can start celebrating.

A hefty document that went before the full board of NHS Tayside last month outlined a large number of projects that aim to deliver more services on the Perth site and avoid the need for patients to travel to Dundee unless absolutely necessary.

Agreement in principle was given for the “umbrella” document of acute balance of care (ABC) proposals with the proviso that each individual project included would come before the board at a future date with detailed proposals and requests for specific funding.

In short, while the big document contains ball-park figures for a satellite renal unit, the cash has not yet been approved and patients will have to contain their excitement until they see machines in PRI and specialist nurses recruited there.

The outline document identifies the need for £1,070,000 of capital to transform the former women’s clinic at PRI into a satellite dialysis unit.

The proposed programme places that funding in the planning for financial year 2006/07, with revenue costs of over £260,000 in the same year and over £530,000 the following year.

Mrs Warden said she did not have a “definite completion date” for the full business case and its presentation to the board of NHS Tayside.

“We are progressing on that fairly rapidly.

“We are just part of the whole ABC development.”