North West Enhanced Supportive Kidney Care Workstream

Enhanced supportive kidney care is the integration of nephrology with specialist palliative care, delivering person-centred care through a MDT approach.

Patients requiring enhanced supportive kidney care are within the late stages of their kidney disease and fall within four broad categories.

The North West ESKC collaborative was established in May 2024 and led by Andrew Nixon, Consultant Nephrologist, Royal Preston Hospital. This brought together healthcare professionals across the region with a shared goal to improve ESKC in Renal Medicine services. This collaborative became a formal workstream within the North West Kidney Network in January 2025. Over the past 3 months, the membership of the group has grown significantly to ensure a ‘whole patient journey approach’ is considered by the ESKC workstream. People with lived kidney problems and healthcare professionals that span a number of specialities and services across primary and secondary care have come together to form the ESKC workstream. This multiprofessional group includes representation from nephrology, primary care, geriatric medicine, palliative care and pharmacy services.

Work completed within the workstream so far:

Plans confirmed to process map current ESKC pathway in all 5 kidney hub sites

The ESKC group has 2 members who both have lived experience of kidney problems; these members of the team give patient perspective and a grounding positive focus to the group. Both members are integral to all aspects of the group and have already added to the value of the work completed to date.

Tara Brook is a trainee doctor who is a great advocate for ensuring ESKC care is built into all treatment pathways for people living with kidney problems. 

Robert Finnigan, the network’s patient voice manager, is a founding member of the ESKC collaborative prior to the group becoming an official workstream. Rob is passionate about ESKC.

Workstream members decided to focus firstly on advanced kidney care, dialysis and conservative kidney management pathways. The transplant pathway will not be explored within the early stages of the workstream plans given the already broad scope of the initial work and additional complexity of the transplant pathway. The group foresee that the transplant pathway will be explored in greater depth following mapping and developing guidance for advanced kidney care, dialysis and conservative kidney management pathways, working collaboratively with all North West Kidney Network workstreams in these endeavours.