Taking Acute Kidney Injury to a Whole New Level
We’ve recently just completed a piece of work in collaboration with Manchester Health & Care Commissioning (MHCC), exploring pathways of care for Acute Kidney Injury (AKI).
AKI is an emerging clinical priority, due to significantly worse short and long-term outcomes for patients, and also because of the huge costs associated with its effects (approximately 1% of the total NHS budget).
We worked with a small number of GP practices in the MHCC region to explore in detail the issues around management of patients with AKI, with the main focus on the transition in and out of hospital. One in five emergency hospital admissions are associated with AKI, so this is a common occurrence. The learning from this work has been useful on a number of levels:
- The GP practices involved have reflected on their own pathways of care for this patient group, and made local improvements where these have been viable.
- Our findings were then shared at a Citywide educational event (for GP practice teams). Since then other practices in the locality have told us they also intend to introduce improvements with their own teams.
- We worked closely with the AKI specialist team at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) throughout this piece of work, facilitating and building local links between primary and secondary care. The learning has been fed back to the Trust to inform future improvements.
- The findings from practices in MHCC have been fed into a wider piece of work that we have been carrying out with the Royal College of General Practitioners. This has led to the creation of a new primary care toolkit, which is now a nationally available resource to support primary care teams in the management of AKI.
We are continuing our work to understand and improve AKI care through several closely aligned projects across the Greater Manchester region.
Date Published: 29/11/2018