Mo213good practices for dialysis education, treatment and ehealth: a scoping review

Abstract Background and Aims Recommendations regarding dialysis education and treatment are provided in various (inter)national guidelines, which should ensure that these are applied uniformly in nephrology and dialysis centers. However, there is much practice variation which could be explained by good practices: practices developed by local health care professionals, which are not evidence-based. Because an overview of good practices is lacking, we performed a scoping review to identify and summarize the available good practices for dialysis education, treatment and eHealth. Method Embase, Pubmed, and the Cochrane Library databases were searched for relevant articles using all synonyms for the words ‘kidney failure’, ‘dialysis’ and ‘good practice’. Relevant articles were structured according to the categories dialysis education, dialysis treatment or eHealth, and assessed for content and results. Results Nineteen articles (12 for dialysis education, 3 for dialysis treatment, 4 for eHealth) are identified. The good practices for education endorse the importance of providing complete and unbiased predialysis education, assisting PD patients in adequately performing PD, educating HD patients on self-management, and talking with dialysis patients about their prognosis. The good practices for dialysis treatment focus mainly on dialysis access devices and general quality improvement of dialysis care. Finally, eHealth is useful for HD and PD and affects both quality of care and health-related quality of life. Conclusion The results of our scoping review can inspire nephrological health care professionals to change their practices and these good practices could be used in addition to guidelines. It is important to increase the attention for local good practices, because they can truly support health care professionals and can improve outcomes and quality of life for patients, even if they are not evidence-based.