Barbara Reid wishes she could have been there for those important early moments in her granddaughter's young life — her first steps, first words and big smile.

Instead, Ms Reid, an Aboriginal woman from remote Western Australia, was stuck in a hospital 800 kilometres away.

For the past 13 years, the 50-year-old has received dialysis treatment for kidney disease in Alice Springs.

"I've been a long, long time worrying for family to go back [and see them]," Ms Reid said. "My little granddaughter. Now she's a big girl. Talking now, my little granddaughter."

But late last year, a new clinic opened in Docker River, a Northern Territory community near the border with WA, about an hour's drive from her family.

She has been there for three weeks now.

The Docker River clinic is operated by a non-government organisation called Purple House, which runs similar services in 12 other communities across the interior of Australia.

It's run by a single dialysis nurse who wants to be known only as Debbie.

Dialysis involves spending up to five hours hooked up to a machine that artificially cleans a patient's blood. ( ABC Goldfields: Tom Joyner )

Three mornings a week Debbie picks up patients from their homes in the community and drives them to the clinic.

"We're talking in the car, we're assessing how they're going. Is there anything wrong that we should know about that needs to change our treatment plan?" Debbie said.

There, patients are given a meal, plugged into their dialysis machine — a tall, humming machine attached to a patient's arm by a mess of thin tubes carrying blood from the body to be cleaned.

Above them are TVs suspended from the ceiling where daytime programming plays. The process can take between three to five hours.

"It's very tiring, as you can imagine, as you can imagine, doing five hours treatment three times a week," Debbie said.

"That's a big chunk of your lifetime waiting around for dialysis."

Coming home to country

Indigenous people in remote Australia suffer catastrophic levels of end-stage kidney disease at a rate 20 times higher than non-Indigenous people.

Access in many remote communities to proper treatment is often impossible without spending long periods of time in a hospital hundreds of kilometres away.

Janie Miama, an Aboriginal elder and former school teacher, does not have much longer to live. ( ABC Goldfields: Tom Joyner )

Remote clinics like the one in Docker River are not cheap either. Purple House estimates each clinic costs around $1 million a year to run.

Patients like Janie Miama, an Aboriginal elder and former school teacher from Docker River, do not have much longer to live.

Through an interpreter, she said she had once long ago been a healthy woman, but clinic workers soon became worried about her kidney health.

She was moved to Alice Springs for six years of dialysis. More recently, she was relieved to be able to finally return home to continue treatment at the Docker River clinic.

After suffering a stroke, her speech is impaired. "I was missing all my kids," she instead wrote in a note on a piece of scrap paper.

Dialysis patients are given meals and can watch daytime television while they receive treatment. ( ABC Goldfields: Tom Joyner )

For many of the patients Debbie treats, their homecoming since the clinic is a kind of medicine in itself.

Being in an unfamiliar place, far from connections to language, country and family, can over time affect patients' wellbeing.

"They are so much more happier and content to be home. They've actually got purpose," Debbie said. "They're lost when they go to town."

After almost many years of relying largely on private donations and fundraising to survive, the Federal Government announced in April remote dialysis would be added to the Medicare Benefits Schedule.

For Purple House chief executive Sarah Brown — as well as the more than 100 patients under her organisation's care at any one time — it was cause for relief.

"It's a significant change for us because in areas of high demand, then we'll be able to look at getting more nurses and more machines to get more people home," Ms Brown said.

"It gives us for the first time in 15 years some stability and some surety that we're going to be able to develop services and fund them into the future."