An Aboriginal corporation has donated an Albert Namatjira painting to an Alice Springs clinic to help it pay nurses to deliver remote dialysis services.

The painting is valued at about $90,000 and the proceeds from its sale will help fill a health service gap in the Indigenous renal health crisis that governments have been slow to address.

Cameron Miller, the chief executive of the Ngurratjuta Aboriginal Corporation, said the board had made a decision to help the Alice Springs-based Purple House clinic “because at the time no one else would”.

End-stage kidney disease patients receive dialysis three times a week and when services are not available in communities they travel to regional centres, which has cultural implications as well as a detrimental impact on health and wellbeing and survival rates.

Purple House provides lifesaving dialysis to Indigenous patients in Alice Springs and a number of remote community clinics, and operates a travelling clinic, the Purple Truck.

Miller said the continuation of Purple House’s community controlled health services had an enormous benefit to NAC members.

“Hence why the board made the decision to make a large donation. We’re an investment organisation and we also make investments to better people’s lives.”

NAC had owned the Namatjira painting since about 1989 and it had been on display at Alice Springs’ Araluen Centre alongside several others until it was delivered to the Purple House chief executive, Sarah Brown.

“I got a phone call to say, ‘Hey Sarah, come to the Araluen art centre and choose a Albert Namatjira painting,’” Brown said. “I was a bit floored.

“It’s such a good story about Aboriginal communities helping each other out. Aboriginal communities and patients can’t wait for governments to sort these things out.”

The money raised through the painting’s sale will help fund salaries of nurses at new dialysis clinics in Docker River, Mount Liebig and Papunya, which the Northern Territory government is setting up but isn’t funding operations until June next year.

“We’re hoping Papunya might open next week,” Brown said. “We’ve promised the patients and their families that we’ll get them home for Christmas and I’ll think we’ll just manage it.”

Brown noted the new clinics were “a long time coming” for communities that are home to family of the Purple House directors.

There’s so much pride about what people have achieved because they have bloody done it themselves against the odds Sarah Brown, Purple House

“They’ve helped all these other communities but haven’t had dialysis in Papunya where lots of them grew up,” Brown said.

In 2015 the NT government accepted a four-year-old federal government offer of $10m to build remote dialysis infrastructure and patient accommodation in Alice Springs. It had long refused the offer – which was originally $13m – because it said it could not afford the operating costs.

“Although in every sense of the word we are a primary healthcare community development model, the commonwealth still argues that dialysis is hospital business, which is state and territory government business, and state and territory governments say they can’t afford services in remote communities,” Brown said.

“We say you can’t afford not to, because the numbers of people on dialysis are still increasing, people are living longer.”

Brown said having to fundraise was a challenge and took time the clinic could use to concentrate on service delivery – but praised the efforts of the Indigenous community to support it.

“There’s so much pride about what people have achieved because they have bloody done it themselves against the odds,” Brown said.

“There are people still waiting for us to fall on our arses but what has developed is this whole kind of holistic service that not only provides dialysis on country but has a focus on wellbeing and social support and cross-cultural dialogue and access to bush medicine and all those things work together well.”

Purple House was established with funds raised by Papunya Tula artists, who held an auction and raised about $1m so they and their communities would have dialysis services closer to home.

It receives funding through various government departments but also relies on philanthropic donations and its own fundraising.

Purple House patients are also contributing, dropping coins in a moneybox when they come through the door.

Funding for the clinic nurses – estimated to cost about $450,000 – has also come from proceeds of a book, sales of bush medicine and an online art auction organised by a Melbourne gallery.

Purple House also covered the first year of operation at an Ernabella clinic, partly funded by the $63,000 sale at auction of a painting donated by Anangu women from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, to a European collector who promptly donated it to the South Australian museum.

The head of anthropology at the museum and auctioneer for that sale, Dr John Carty, said it was an emotional moment for everyone and, in donating the painting, the buyer “got what it was about”.

“Let’s face it, a lot of the art being celebrated or sold for hundreds of thousands on the art market is by people who are suffering from health issues or their family are,” Carty told Guardian Australia. “Rather than waiting for someone else to address the problem, they use art to bring attention to the health issues.

“The fact that Purple House has to beg and borrow and steal to get basic funding is kind of criminal.”