Abstract
BackgroundRecommendations 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.MethodsEmbase, Pubmed, the Cochrane Library, CINAHL databases and Web of Science 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.ResultsNineteen 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 objective predialysis education, assisting peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients in adequately performing PD, educating hemodialysis (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.ConclusionOur scoping review identifies 19 articles describing good practices and their results for dialysis education, dialysis treatment, and eHealth. These good practices could be valuable in addition to guidelines for increasing shared-decision making in predialysis education, using patients’ contribution in the implementation of their dialysis treatment, and advanced care planning.
Highlights
According to the latest estimates, more than 320 million patients are treated with dialysis worldwide [1]
EHealth is useful for HD and peritoneal dialysis (PD) and affects both quality of care and health-related quality of life
17 articles were excluded for the following reasons: no good practice described [5, 16,17,18,19,20], content of the good practice not described [21,22,23,24], good practice not regarding dialysis education or dialysis treatment [25], articles describing a guideline [26, 27] or review [23, 28,29,30]
Summary
According to the latest estimates, more than 320 million patients are treated with dialysis worldwide [1]. In 2010, it was shown that variation in center-specific factors (e.g. number of patients, in-center HD treatment capacity, and availability of a late dialysis shift) in the United States influenced the utilization of home dialysis (i.e. home HD and PD) [11] This appears to be true for many other countries when looking at the variation in PD utilization [12]. Practice variation within a country seems to associate with a broad range in the percentage of dialysis patients treated with home dialysis [13] Part of this variation can be explained by socalled ‘good practices’ which are developed locally. 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
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
