Advanced Kidney Care

Purpose

Advanced Kidney Care clinics (AKCC) provide the forum for patients to work with their kidney team to make decisions about their future kidney treatment options (including transplantation, dialysis, and supportive care). The Advance Kidney Care Group will work collaboratively with transplant, dialysis and supportive care Groups to support wide-spread shared decision making and development of agreed pathways and patient information. It will support educational work to ensure the workforce is appropriately trained.

LKN Leads

Heather Brown

Clinical Lead

Linda Tarm

Senior Project Manager

What is Advanced Kidney Care?

Advanced kidney care (AKC) is the crossroads between early kidney disease and progression to dialysis, supportive care or transplantation. Done well, it can improve access to kidney transplantation, dialysis at home therapies, and supportive care.  Patients with advanced CKD should follow a structured care pathway and should have access to an AKC Clinic, which offers comprehensive access to supportive care and multiprofessional support from a dietitian, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, psychologist and a social worker

Aims and objectives of the group:

Aims

  1. Enhance advanced kidney care (AKC) in London, for example by using the national transform AKC project to learn, share and align
  2. Promote strong patient engagement to ensure co-designed AKC work
  3. Ensure that all people entering AKC in London have access to a clearly defined high level of care
  4. Prevent or slow progression to end-stage kidney disease (ESKD), and hence renal replacement therapy, by providing early and targeted patient information and prompt referral to an AKC clinic
  5. Have a robust way to measure AKC care, to compare against standards and to identify inequalities and areas for improvement

Objectives

  1. Work with renal units involved in national AKC transformation project
  2. Ensure patients’ insights inform work priorities and content
  3. Create an AKC pathway and define standards of care. Map against it to highlight unwarranted variation ​
  4. Engage with all London units, patient representatives and other relevant partners to determine how to best ensure delivery of pre-AKC patient education and timely referral to AKCC
  5. Work with related LKN workstreams to:​
    1. Ensure alignment of messaging and collaborate where indicated​
    2. Agree 5 priority metrics (across the entire AKC pathway) that reflect AKC care provision