Kidney Thinking. The blog from Think Kidneys

The Festive Period for the Acute Medicine services in my area of the country (and indeed in others) has been frantic to levels that I cannot recall. More patients are being admitted to the acute medical beds and beyond, as the walls of the medical wards stretch to accommodate the beds within the surgical establishment.  This so called boarding of patients is never satisfactory and indeed…

Primary care is in the news almost every day,  often with negative comments about GP surgeries not being open long enough or  not coping with the increasing patient burden. The NHS is stretched and primary care is the first door through which many patients pass. Every day GPs have to deal with an enormous range of diseases from the self-limiting to the life threatening. Unlike many…

A couple of years ago I was admitted to hospital with flu-like symptoms and possible dehydration; before I fainted I recall asking what the team were checking me for. ‘Acute kidney injury’, came the reply, which both reassured but also worried me.  It reassured me because the very fact I was being checked meant I was in the right place, but it worried me as my…

Earlier this year I opened the newspapers to find headlines about people dying in NHS hospitals due to thirst. These were stories about acute kidney injury and there is, it seems considerable ignorance in the media, public and professional groups about this very important safety issue. We have two kidneys, sitting in our abdomen at the back. Every minute of every day, the kidneys clean our…