Welcome

What is sustainable kidney care?

This 1-hour module explains the relationship between kidney health and the climate. It uses practical examples to demonstrate how to provide high-quality care while reducing environmental pollution.

Kidney care is a resource-intensive specialty. This means we spend a lot of time, energy and money on each patient’s treatment. The carbon emissions from dialysis per patient year can be 18 times greater than the emissions of medical care as a whole.

Simple changes can improve patient outcomes, reduce pollution and waste, save staff time and cost less. We can reduce the waste and pollution of intensive procedures like kidney replacement therapy, and we can make care pathways more efficient. And of course, we should try to prevent kidney disease to reduce the number of patients needing care.

Who is this training for?

· Doctors & nurses working in dialysis or kidney care	· Dieticians
· Administrators and purchasing departments	· Pharmacists
· Dialysis technicians	· Social workers
· Waste and facility managers	· Transplant teams
· Medical technologists	· Dialysis teams

What will you learn?

The module consists of short explanations, case studies and practical examples. It will prepare you to design sustainable improvements in your place of work.

Describe how climate change threatens kidney health
Recognise how kidney care contributes to climate change
Improve patient outcomes while reducing waste, pollution and cost

KitNewCare is a Horizon Europe project to improve kidney health while reducing carbon emissions by 40%. It will also reduce financial costs and social harm. Practical solutions are being tested in kidney centres in Italy, Poland, Spain and The Netherlands. The aim of KitNewCare is to provide a model for change in other kidney centres.