Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is a topic that has received increasing attention over the last few years. In 2009 the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) reported that only 50% of patients with AKI received good care and that 20% of patients had avoidable and predictable AKI. It is estimated that approximately 13-18% of all admissions to hospital have AKI costing the health service in excess of £434 million a year (NICE 2013).
Therefore strategies are needed to tackle AKI including increased education to enable enhanced understanding of the aetiology identification and management. Recommendations within the NCEPOD report (2009) highlight the need in undergraduate medical education. However student nurses are our future workforce and should be given the skills necessary to recognise the sick patient and identify patients with and at risk of AKI.
Think Kidneys is an NHS campaign aimed at improving the care of patients with AKI. The website includes lots of resources and best practice from institutions around the UK. One aspect of this campaign is the generation of resources for undergraduate nursing education. To enable standardisation of undergraduate knowledge and understanding around AKI. The project produced lesson plans and PowerPoint presentations to enable educators and lecturers to be able to deliver education on AKI without being experts on renal.
The relevance of this particular innovation to the wider audience is that if there is an expectation that all student nurses will have a basic understanding of the renal system. This will include; the functions of the kidney problems leading to reduction in function (AKI and Chronic renal disease) and identification and management of AKI in patients with complex needs. It is hoped that by raising awareness of AKI it will help to improve outcome (Xu et al. 2014).
