Can you advise a way to get our upcoming graduates involved in programs to assist Dialysis patients?
As an Australian, I can’t change or even influence your training program(s).
Here, Training in home haemodialysis and home peritoneal dialysis is a core requirement. All trainees in nephrology must … repeat, must … have core training in a set number of home PHD and PD patients with documented involvement in their selection, training, and at-home support care.
That then begs the question of ‘how do they get that training’?
Here, 92% of all training centres have training for home HD and 95% train for home PD. As in a 3 year training program where trainees must move from centre to centre to access different ideas, different personalities, different emphases, different expertise … it would be thus almost mathematically impossible for a trainee to emerge without easy access to home-based dialysis training.
Would that it were so in the US.
In the US, my understanding from the Likes of Professor Blagg, Professor Kjellstand, Professor Ing and Professor Lockridge is that the percentage of US services with Trainee home training capability is almost a mirror image of ours. As I understand it from them, less than 10% of US services are geared up to home train a trainee. Most US trainee graduates still emerge blissfully unaware of the possibilities in and benefits of home dialysis. No wonder the attitudes to home care are like those mirrored in the subsequent thread - by MooseMum - regarding the fear(s) around lone home dialysis.
How you change the US system, though, is for you - in the US - to sort out. I am very comfy with our programs here. Look at Hong Kong, the UK, Canada, Turkey, Finland, the rest of Europe … and you will find systems very different to your own. I do not presume to judge which is best … though outcomes help suggest an answer.