Kidney Care UK Hospital Grants fund a wide range of patient projects, clinical equipment, renal unit infrastructure, and staff posts such as renal social workers, physiotherapists, renal counsellors and youth workers.
Post: Clinical Psychologist, Essex (Mid and South Essex NHS Trust)
Project: Developing and piloting specialist training to address renal treatment challenges, King's College
Project: Shared Haemodialysis Care – Empowering the patients, Sheffield Teaching Hospital
Project: York Hospital Patient Support Network, York and Scarborough Teaching Hospital
Post: Focus Group Facilitator, University of Manchester
Project: Experiences of underserved groups who have had remote kidney clinics, London South Bank/ Barts Health NHS Trust
Post: Clinical Psychologist, Essex (Mid and South Essex NHS Trust)
Number of patients at renal unit: 800
Number of patients expected to benefit: Every week, 10 face-to-face and one group session. If 20 contact hours per used as per BACP suggestion, then 840 contacts per year would be undertaken based on a 42 work week year.
Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation trust was formed by the amalgamation of Basildon, Southend and Broomfield trusts. The service now covers a population of 1.2 million with a dialysis cohort of approximately 500 patients and a transplant cohort of 300 patients. Having a larger unit means that we can co-ordinate specialist care for the overall demand across the region.
Basildon and Southend have high areas of deprivation with demand for psychological support. They feel that this post will help serve patients better and that they will see improvement in wider outcomes as part of the reconfiguration.
There has not been consistent provision of this service in this region. They have relied on community provision of services to tackle these issues.
Key areas of focus will be:
- Help patients and carers cope with diagnosis and illness, and anticipated changes in trajectory of the illness
- Help guide patients and carers emotionally through complex treatments choices and shared care decision making particularly with regards to home based treatments or conservative care.
- Understand and resolve treatment concordance with regards to pre-dialysis patients and dialysis patients, and educate renal staff on the complex psychological interplay between personality and treatment outcomes.
- Help create a more empathetic, patient-centred atmosphere in the kidney service thereby improving patient experience.
Project: Developing and piloting specialist training to address renal treatment challenges, King's College
We estimate that 1000 patients a year will benefit from this project at KCH and potentially a similar number at each of the six other London Kidney Network Centres. In future years further patients could benefit as the training is offered more widely.
We will produce specialist training resources to help renal specialists (including nurses, dieticians, consultants and pharmacists) support patients experiencing challenges with treatment, dietary changes and dialysis. The Centre for Adherence Research and Education (CARE), based at King's College London (KCL) and the renal unit at King's College Hospital (KCH), London will produce an evidence-based and clinically-informed training resource. Training will include:
- tools for understanding patients' individual challenges
- techniques to address these challenges.
Funding will support the development of training resources (videos, case studies) and its evaluation. We will pilot and evaluate the training at KCH, offer London-wide and make available nationally at the end of the project.
We will audit patient treatment challenges and subsequent clinical indicators pre and post delivery of training. We will also collect post-training evaluation questionnaires from attendees immediately after the training and one month later.
Project: Shared Haemodialysis Care – Empowering the patients, Sheffield Teaching Hospital
Shared Haemodialysis Care offers patients attending haemodialysis centres empowered choice to be more independent and take control of their own health.
The Health Care Professionals (HCPs) training programme supported by Kidney Care UK over the last four years has been a major influence in how haemodialysis care is delivered nationally. As a result of the pandemic, the successful transition to online training has increased the breadth of reach and access for patients and HCPs to collaborate virtually. Driving the demand ‘from’ patients, ‘through’ patients is the new focus via an independent route to learning, self-development and involvement in co design.
Approximately 30,000 patients are on dialysis in the UK. Whether they are on peritoneal dialysis or haemodialysis, they will all face choices and most will experience different treatments. This project will be widely advertised to raise awareness of how Shared Haemodialysis Care can benefit those wishing to have a degree of independence and empowerment throughout their journey with chronic kidney disease. All participating units attending forums and training will influence patient participation.
Project: York Hospital Patient Support Network, York and Scarborough Teaching Hospital
Number of participants expected to benefit: 300 patients, 30 carers, 30 Patient Peer Support Workers, 50 Health Care Professionals
York and Scarborough Teaching Hospital and Kidney Care UK created the patient peer support network through a patient/carer and healthcare professional partnership in 2019.
York and Scarborough Teaching Hospital are now committed to identifying sustainable funding over the next 3 years in order to:
- build on this partnership with Kidney Care UK, to extend peer support to chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients in diabetes/renal & heart failure/renal clinics
- improve patient/carer experience and prevent deterioration to CKD5 and its consequences
- build a wider support network to ensure sustainability (involving patients/carers/professionals in the Northeast, collaboration with King's and other leaders) to ensure other networks have access to the best choices and share lived experiences/Quality of Life.
York and Scarborough Teaching Hospital intends to evaluate the progress of the programme/network including training (session evaluations), information, access to the network, peer support meetings.
Post: Focus Group Facilitator, University of Manchester
This application is to fund a part-time focus group facilitator for 6 months. The role will be part of a qualitative research associate post at the University of Manchester. The role is to facilitate co-design focus groups to develop an electronic and equitable symptom reporting and management functionality in Patients Know Best. This functionality supports all people with kidney disease – irrespective of their background – to be more involved in their care by contributing symptom data to their consultation and care plan. Ultimately, this enhances communication between patients and renal teams, shared decision making, and patients’ experience and outcomes of care.
Project: Experiences of underserved groups who have had remote kidney clinics, London South Bank/ Barts Health NHS Trust
The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in rapid and sometimes chaotic introduction of digital technologies in the NHS, including remote clinics (not face-to-face). These changes were often heralded as being responsive, innovative and person-centred, but there is concern that they may have adversely affected existing health inequalities in underserved communities, for example individuals with poor health literacy, who are not fluent in English, have a learning disability or cognitive or mental health issues. Underserved groups have certain common key characteristics such as high healthcare burden and important differences in how they respond to or engage with healthcare interventions. Few studies however have investigated the impact of digital interventions specifically on health inequality.
The proposed project aims to understand the experiences of people from underserved groups who have been recipients of remote kidney clinics. They also aim to explore the experiences of staff delivering consultations remotely. The findings will be used to better understand what works best in delivering remote clinics, to make recommendations for clinical practice, and to develop a training Toolkit for both staff and patients to improve the experiences of remote care.