Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve diagnosis of Chronic Kidney Disease for (a) younger patients and (b) broadly.

NHS England is working to detect people at risk of kidney disease through the NHS Health Check Programme. The programme, which is available for everyone between the ages of 40 and 74 years old, who is not already on a chronic disease register, assesses people’s health and risk of developing certain health problems. Using this information, patients are supported to make behavioural changes and access treatment which helps to prevent and detect kidney disease earlier.

NHS England has established the Renal Services Transformation Programme (RSTP), which aims to reduce unwarranted variation in the quality and accessibility of renal care, to improve outcomes and services for those with kidney disease. NHS England, through the RSTP and regional renal networks, is implementing initiatives to provide better, integrated care, to reduce health inequalities, and to focus on prevention and timely intervention for kidney disease.

Working in collaboration with the NHS RightCare Programme and the renal community, the RSTP has developed a renal toolkit to provide integrated care boards, renal clinical networks, and providers with tools, case studies, and principles to support transformation of services at a local level. The toolkit outlines principles to support better management of patients identified with chronic kidney disease (CKD) throughout their patient journey. The RSTP is also working closely with NHS England’s regional renal clinical networks to review this toolkit, and to work with local partners to develop transformation programmes that will focus on early identification and management of kidney disease, and will seek to reduce the number of patients progressing through various stages of CKD, and reduce the number of patients requiring dialysis. By supporting prevention and early intervention, the need for late-stage treatments will be reduced.

Regional renal clinical networks prioritise the prevention and early diagnosis of CKD within their transformation ambitions. This includes considerations to develop a unified approach to testing populations at risk of developing CKD, and includes raising awareness of diagnostic tools like urine albumin creatinine tests, enabling CKD diagnosis at stages 1 and 2. NHS England aims to improve awareness and access to these important urine and blood tests across primary and secondary care.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guidance, Chronic kidney disease: Assessment and management [NG203], updated in November 2021, sets out best practice for clinicians in the diagnosis and management of CKD. The guidance covers the care and treatment of patients at risk of CKD. It includes recommendations on the monitoring of patients at risk of CKD, and aims to prevent or delay the progression of the disease. The guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng203