Dr Graham Lipkin, Co-Chair of KQuIP, Clinical vice President of the Renal Association. 26/6/16
KQuIP has a strong mandate to support you to improve kidney care with patients.
KQuIP is driven from within our community, will not replace existing networks and will be constant without repeated changes typical of NHS structures.
The renal community is recognised for innovation in healthcare delivery: look at the Renal Registry, Patient View and Renal Association Clinical Practice Guidelines together with the successful Acute kidney Injury delivery board as exemplars. Despite this we have only to open any page in our Registry Report to see significant unwarranted variation between Renal Units and Regions/Home Countries for both children and adults with kidney disease. The kidney community is asking itself to employ this innovation once again to help us address less good outcomes and improve care for children and adults affected by kidney illnesses in England and the Home Countries.
A packed room of kidney health professionals and patients at UK Kidney Week 2016 witnessed the launch of the Kidney Quality Improvement Partnership (KQuIP). The energy in the room was palpable reflecting the consensus that such an inclusive initiative is needed, the desire to get involved and the work and engagement across the community that the KQuIP group had invested.
KQuIP is a dynamic network of kidney health professionals, patients and carers …committed to developing, supporting and sharing quality improvement in kidney services in order to enhance outcomes and quality of life for patients with kidney disease.
The key word is support as quality improvement can only be delivered by you in your everyday practice. I’m convinced that each one of us go to work wishing to achieve the best possible clinical outcomes. The energy is there, it’s the support that we’re all missing. As before this will come from within the community.
KQuIP has broadly engaged: all the professional renal societies, Renal registry, patient groups, NHS England support, renal industries & kidney charities plus Health Foundation support. It has a strong Programme Board and Operational Group with 6 multi-professionally led work streams.
KQuIP exists to support you and not to replace what’s working.
At the KQuIP Design Event in June 2016 we received 3 clear answers to our questions from across the kidney care continuum:
- Barriers to delivering QI. Identified barriers to improving quality in kidney services included perceived lack of time and limited sharing of good practice, coordination of QI projects, limited access to outcome data and QI resources including financial and educational opportunities in QI methodology, limited leadership and training, and the current culture of our health system which provides too little support for improving quality.
- Key Priorities for improvement: included access to kidney transplantation (pre-emptive transplant listing and transplantation and better long term transplant management), increasing access to home dialysis therapies (haemo and peritoneal dialysis), acute kidney injury (improving identification and pathways of care), improving AV fistula access rates, paediatric to adult transitional care, optimising patient engagement, informed choice, shared and self-care and improved patient safety (medicines management and infection control).
- What’s needed from KQuIP to support QI in Kidney Care: Supporting professionally led communities in combination with patients, focused around existing regional delivery structures were seen as key elements for KQuIP. Developing QI projects, peer support between units, effective educational and leadership resources and sharing good practice to drive collaborative cultures, as well as ongoing commitment, were seen as vital to enable change.