Peer Support for Late Presenters
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A pilot study on the impact of peer support for people with advanced kidney failure presenting late to renal services.
IRAS ID
204510
Contact name
Eleri Wood
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College HospitalNHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 3 months, 0 days
Research summary
People with kidney disease find it reassuring and useful to talk to other patients with kidney disease. This is known as peer support. Research has shown that peer support can be particularly helpful when people are making decisions about kidney treatments. Unfortunately some patients get very little time to be involved with these decisions because they are not known to kidney specialists until they urgently need treatment. This can make a carefully planned start on kidney dialysis difficult. As a result these 'late presenters' often find it more difficult to adjust to life with kidney disease, have reduced or delayed access to transplant and home dialysis, and have more medical problems. They might particularly benefit from peer support, but this has never been formally tried or tested. A full-scale test of the idea will be risky to set up because of the things that we don't know. For example we don't know whether it's possible to recruit enough peer supporters or exactly when and how late-presenting patients are able to or interested in receiving peer support.
This study aims to answer these questions by doing a 'test run' on a small number of late-presenting patients who will be offered regular contact with a peer supporter for four weeks. It will also explore how easy it is to measure the effects of peer support by asking the patients to complete questionnaires about their care and quality of life. We will compare their answers to those we get from patients who presented late but did not receive peer support. We also want patients to tell us in their own words how peer support has affected them and so will interview them.
Our findings will help the development of peer support for kidney patients and larger trials to look at its benefits.REC name
London - Chelsea Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/1209
Date of REC Opinion
25 Jul 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion