Kidney Disease HIT reviews 2021-22

In June 2021, we welcomed Pippa Bailey, Consultant Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, to join Dominic Taylor as co-director of the Kidney Disease HIT.

As a HIT we aim to expand the types of projects we work on, to include a broader range of research and other activities to improve the health of people with kidney disease in the Bristol region and beyond.

Our public contributor HIT members Primrose Granville and Soumeya Bouacida are a particular strength of the HIT. They play a vital role in advising us on our planned research and service development work, leading their own regional projects, sitting on research steering committees, attending national charity events, securing funding and delivering community engagement activities.

As a HIT we continue to focus on addressing inequities in care, through its research, service development and patient-centred projects. This year we have had particular success in improving access to kidney transplantation.

We have had research published on identifying reasons for ethnic inequity in access to living-donor kidney transplantation: read the paper.

Primrose Granville has been awarded funding from NHS Blood and Transplant for community engagement events on organ donation and transplantation for Bristol’s African and Caribbean heritage communities.

We have had a paper published on the Wellcome Trust-funded ASK trial: improving AccesS to Kidney transplantation, where an intervention has been developed to address barriers experienced by socioeconomically deprived individuals: read the paper. The intervention is now being evaluated in a feasibility trial.

Our ongoing projects include Integrate-CKD: investigating novel ways of delivering care for Chronic Kidney Disease in primary care. The team is working with evidence synthesis experts at the University of Exeter, and have planned an intervention component analysis study, to be completed in June 2022. A publication will follow, which is expected to support future grant applications in this area.

HIT PPI members sit on the working group and will play a key role in developing a multimedia renal patient information resource for the North Bristol NHS Trust Kidney Unit patient website. Funding from Southmead Hospital Charity has been secured to help develop this resource.

HIT members also led the writing of British Transplantation Society national guidelines for testing living kidney donors for APOL1 genetic variants. These have been approved for publication. An application for the South West Genomic Laboratory Hub to be the national hub for UK testing has been submitted.

Looking to the future, the HIT will part-fund a study looking at how useful cardiac disease screening is before kidney transplantation, and another study investigating resuscitation among people with kidney disease.