Follow-up and Outcomes of Critically Ill Patients with Acute Kidney Injury
General Audience Summary
Follow-up Care for Critically Ill Patients with Kidney Injury More than half of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) get kidney injury. These patients do worse than those who do not get kidney injury. Sometimes, patients with kidney injury in the ICU are sick enough to need dialysis. In Alberta, this type of dialysis is usually managed by the ICU doctors, not the kidney doctors. That means, when patients get better and go home, they may never see a kidney doctor, even if there is still kidney damage leftover. Follow-up care for these patients may help in the prevention, early detection, and management of kidney diseases. Currently, it is unclear how often patients with kidney disease in the ICU are getting follow-up care and if it is effective in preventing diseases. There is a need for high-quality research to better understand what follow-up care these patients are getting and what should be monitored to keep them healthy. We want to study how often patients with kidney disease in the ICU get follow-up care after they go home from hospital. We also want to understand if this follow-up care leads to better health for them. We have a large database called the Alberta Kidney Disease Network that we will use to answer these questions. One of the unique features of this database is that it has all the blood and urine tests done anywhere in the province. We will be able to find all the patients who were admitted to the ICU in Alberta since 2002 and had kidney injury. Based on the test results, we will know how severe their kidney injury was and whether they needed dialysis. We will also find out how well their kidneys were working when they left the hospital and if they had any follow-up for kidney health afterwards. Our research will help us understand how often patients with kidney injury in the ICU get follow-up, and what some of the barriers are. Understanding these factors will help us find ways to prevent patients from getting kidney failure and heart disease. Overall, we will find important gaps in care for patients who go home from the hospital after being in the ICU. This will help us improve the experiences and kidney health for these patients.
