A socially distanced Organ Donation Week (7-13 September) was always going to be a challenge, but all over the UK people went above and beyond to raise awareness. Organ Donation Week 2020 The theme of Organ Donation Week 2020 was to open up the discussion and get people to talk
General News
Your Voice Matters!
Share your experience of kidney care We need kidney care to be always improving and to do that it’s important that, as someone living with kidney disease, you have your say about your experience of care. It’s by listening to you and getting your feedback that change happens and services
Complementary therapies and dialysis. A pilot study
Cancer charities throughout the UK offer complementary therapies that can be used alongside conventional medical treatments. These therapies are associated with benefits like an improved sense of wellbeing, better symptom control and an overall improvement in quality of life. However, kidney patients do not routinely have access to such treatments.
Research and innovation – How the KPA helped
As a young consultant in the renal unit at Guy’s Hospital, one of the challenges I faced was to build up a programme of research alongside my clinical duties. Moving from Oxford to the Guy’s renal unit in 1988, I was lucky to have colleagues who supported my research aspirations.
Patient experience – national survey results
Patient Reported Experience Measure In the summer of 2019, 493 Guy’s kidney patients kindly completed the Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM). National survey of kidney care This is a national survey of kidney care in the UK – you may remember being asked to complete a yellow questionnaire either in
And the winner is…
In Issue 22 of Kidney Talk, we announced the winners of our KPA Research Competition. In this article, Ms Hannah Maple, one of our two winners, describes her project and how her research will help support kidney patients’ quality of life. Mr Nicos Kessaris and I are delighted to have
Let’s have a BIG conversation!
Held in February, the Big Conversation brought together Black living kidney donors, Black kidney patients, and their friends and family to talk about living kidney donation with GSTT kidney specialists. The aim of the event was to help Black patients, who are often reluctant to talk about living donation, to
Living Well on Dialysis
In 2017 the KPA provided an innovation grant to the GSTT Chaplaincy team to help people who were having difficulty living on dialysis. The Living Well on Dialysis (LWD) programme ran for two years in the New Cross Gate unit and has now been expanded to run in both New
World World Kidney Day – March 2020
Thank you to everyone – kidney patients, kidney staff and representatives of Kidney Care UK – who operated the World Kidney Day stand in the lobby of Guy’s Hospital in March. As kidney patients, we know that all too often the general public, and sometimes our friends and families, seem
The London Transplant Collaborative
I have luckily not experienced kidney failure, but I suspect I would be devastated if I were on the waiting list for a kidney transplant and, after a long wait, an organ became available, yet the transplant did not proceed due to a lack of access to an operating theatre.