Celebrating World Kidney Day 2021
World Kidney Day is a global awareness campaign aimed at promoting kidney health.
Every year kidney patients, their families and renal unit staff host stalls across Barts Health to promote awareness of kidney health and the life-changing impact of organ donation and kidney transplantation.
Sadly, in March 2020 we cancelled our stalls, just before the first lockdown, and unfortunately this year we cannot get together again.
Kidney patients have been disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic and this year’s World Kidney Day theme ‘Living Well with Kidney Disease’ has been chosen to highlight the challenges they face.
“Nobody knows what’s around the corner, or whether they’d be faced with a situation that requires help.”
“Things always get better with time, you never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.”
Impact of Covid
Patients with advanced kidney disease are likely to become extremely unwell if they contract Covid. At Barts Health we care for more than 3500 such patients. Our transplant patients and those doing peritoneal dialysis or home haemodialysis 1MB have been shielding for much of the past year, unable to continue their usual work and social activities. Most of our haemodialysis patients have still needed to leave their homes to attend hospital three times per week for their life-saving dialysis treatment.
Our Kidney Patient Forum 554KB has moved online to help address the isolation that many are experiencing with almost 100 people attending our last virtual meeting. Our Annual Service of Remembrance also moved online this year and provided much comfort.
Support from our community partners through community phlebotomy hubs for blood tests and GPs coming into our haemodialysis units to give Covid vaccinations have been key to enabling care to continue safely. Working together, we try to help our patients find the strength to ‘Live well with kidney disease’ and we look forward to getting together on World Kidney Day in 2022!
