Kidney Matters - Issue 12 Spring 2021

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The Peer Support Toolkit
Jenny and Chris Rolfe
Developed by Professor Nicola Thomas, Professor of Kidney Care at London South Bank
University, and Eleri Wood, renal nurse consultant at King’s College Hospital NHS Trust,
the Toolkit supports kidney units to establish and maintain a peer support programme
to provide informational and emotional support for people with kidney disease.
Patients in later stages of chronic kidney disease are
managed by specialists in kidney outpatient services.
As kidney failure approaches, patients are involved in
decisions about kidney replacement therapy including
type of dialysis, transplantation or conservative
management.
Education and support are provided by health
professionals, but for many patients, this is a
challenging and distressing time. Not only do they have
to adjust to life with chronic illness, but they must also
process complex, technical information in order to
make difficult decisions about future treatment that
impacts profoundly on everyday life.
Created in collaboration with a patient group at Barts
Health NHS Trust and King’s College Hospital NHS
Trust, the Toolkit has been designed to overcome
barriers and drivers to poor uptake of peer support
in kidney care. Professor Nicola Thomas says, “There
is such an important need for patients with kidney
disease to have support from others who are in the
same situation. Our findings suggest that similar
programmes like this either don’t get started or there
are challenges for the programme to continue. This is
the reason we have set up the Toolkit.”
How it works
Eleri Wood explains, “Peer support is available to
every single patient in the unit and their significant
others, although it is most commonly used in the
low clearance setting for decision support. At King’s
College hospital in London, we keep a pool of around
20 peer supporters on standby at any one time.
Although on average, a peer supporter is called upon
relatively infrequently (three or four times a year) we
feel it is important to keep a varied range of people
available – young and old, men and women, with
experience of a variety of treatment types and from
a range of backgrounds – so that patients can have
access to someone they can relate to at a time that is
right for them.
“That’s the very nature of a peer
… that you feel you can relate
to them, there’s no white coat in
between you and them.”
“… looking at them you
realise there’s a lot of life
ahead. And a lot of people
are walking around having
dialysis or kidney transplant
and they carry on fairly
normal lives.”