Project #137:
Healthcare needs for people with chronic kidney disease in the COVID-19 era

Background:

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a public health problem facing unprecedented challenges due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. CKD patients were amongst those at the greatest risk of death and severe illness as a result of COVID-19, whilst restrictions and the subsequent backlog have impacted healthcare access. Monitoring of CKD by GP practices may have been impacted due to stretched resources and changes to remuneration, while kidney transplantation programmes had to be paused at times.

Aim:

In this project, we plan to make use of existing healthcare data from across England to determine how healthcare use and quality of life has varied year on year since 2017-2018 for people with CKD.

Proposed methods:

We will undertake analyses for each financial year from 2017-2018 to 2022-2023.

For each year, we will report the number of people with CKD at the beginning of each financial year, grouped into different CKD severity groups including dialysis patients and kidney transplant recipients. We will then describe various measures of healthcare needs by each CKD group for each quarter of each year.

For people not on dialysis or with kidney transplant, we will report how many people in each CKD group either progressed to a more advanced stage of CKD or died each year. For people on dialysis or with kidney transplant, we will describe the number of people who died.

From our counts of healthcare needs, we will estimate the costs across each financial year from 2017-2018 to 2022-2023 for each CKD stage. We will estimate the average healthcare cost per person for each CKD stage, investigating further for geographical and socioeconomic disparities. We will then estimate the quality of life impact across each year for each CKD group, again investigating further for geographical and socioeconomic disparities. Topic areas