Innovating and evaluating education for people with kidney disease

A Community Kidney Service has been running since 2016 in four Clinical Commissioning Groups in East London. The service aims to improve primary care identification, coding and management of CKD, identification of progressive CKD from monthly surveillance of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) results, development of a single pathway from primary to secondary care with rapid access to specialist advice provided by e-clinics and promotion of patient self-management. A long term anticipated outcome of the service will be a reduction in incident end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) growth in East London. This paper focuses on the patient education and self-management aspects of the service and describes how these have been developed, implemented and evaluated. Almost 350 patients with mild-to-moderate (category G3a/G3b) CKD have attended either one-to-one or group education sessions since 2016 and there has been positive patient feedback. However there remains a paucity of evidence that supports self-management for CKD in terms of changing health behaviours, so further evaluation and research is necessary. This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a work to be published in final form in the Journal of Kidney Care copyright © MA Healthcare, after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/toc/jokc/current