Kidney Disease ─ From Advanced Disease to Bereavement

Kidney Disease: From advanced disease to bereavement provides guidance to renal and palliative care professionals dealing with patients with advanced kidney disease who are approaching end of life. The book describes the tools used to achieve a good death including advance care planning, symptom control law and ethics, recognising dying, withdrawal of treatment, and a holistic approach to patient care. By using case histories, the book highlights how to facilitate good communication between patients, families and their renal team. There are also chapters on support for carers and bereavement.

Revised and updated this new edition is written in a bullet point style to provide an indispensable guide to day-to-day management of patient care. This pocketbook will be an essential guide for nephrologists, renal nurses, nephrologist trainees, and doctors and nurses working in palliative care.

Edwina Brown is a clinical nephrologist with a special interest in patient outcomes, particularly the elderly, on dialysis. Over the last decade she has developed an increasing interest in the support and management of renal patients at their end of life. She was an editor of "Supportive Care for the Renal Patient", first published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and with a second edition in 2010, has published and lectured extensively on the topic and runs an annual course on "Supportive Care for the Renal Patient". She is currently a member of the UK End of Life Care for Advanced Kidney Care Disease Project Board.

Fliss qualified in medicine in the UK in 1986. She initially trained in General Practice, and worked as a General Practitioner from 1992 - 2000, then undertook specialist training in palliative medicine between 2000 and 2004. She went on to undertake a PhD at King's College London, on 'Improving the quality of care of patients with Stage 5 Chronic Kidney Disease managed without dialysis' in the Department of Palliative Care, Policy & Rehabilitation at King's College London. She has now gained a HEFCE Clinical Senior Lecturership - one of the first nationally in Palliative Care. She is based at King's College London and King's College Hospital.
She has published on the palliative and end-of-life care needs of renal patients, including on symptoms, withdrawal from dialysis, survival, and use of opioids. Fliss has a keen interest in longitudinal study, including methodological development, and symptom and functional trajectories in the last year of life (including for renal patients).