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Impact of pandemic mobility restrictions on kidney transplant patients’ experience: lessons on quality of care

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Abstract

Background

Patient perspectives on their post-operative health are acknowledged as valuable healthcare outcomes and should be scrupulously considered when designing interventions for patient-centered healthcare. Yet, following the COVID-19 lockdown and in the absence of standardized guidelines on how to best provide virtual chronic care to kidney transplant recipients, little is known about how this unique population coped and managed to comply with public health indications during confinement.

Methods

This study addresses this shortcoming by examining the experiences of patients from a tertiary hospital in Spain during the initial weeks of the lockdown decreed by the national government. Specifically, we focus our attention on the perceptions and experiences of these patients by retrieving robust qualitative and quantitative data: the former based on a thematic analysis of focus group transcripts, the latter obtained from a large-scale survey.

Results

Our findings identify opportunities for improvement in the quality of care and point to the provisions that might be made when facing future pandemics or lockdown-requiring situations.

Conclusions

As healthcare services navigate evolving landscapes, our findings on the experience of kidney transplant recipients should enable hospital services to improve the quality of care they are able to provide to such patients during periods of restricted mobility, especially those associated with future disease emergencies, and considering that home confinement is often part of the natural course of post-operative care of these patients.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors extend their sincere gratitude to the patients and caregivers whose participation made this research possible and to Iain Robinson for his assistance as a medical writer during the writing of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Patient Experience Observatory, Hospital Clínic Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Joan Fernando, Eva Palou & Joan Escarrabill

  2. Department of Nephrology and Renal Transplantation, Hospital Clínic Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Ignacio Revuelta & Beatriu Bayés

  3. Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Clinical Institute of Nephrology and Urology (LENIT), Barcelona, Spain

    Ignacio Revuelta & Beatriu Bayés

  4. Department of Medicine, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Ignacio Revuelta & Beatriu Bayés

  5. Red de Investigación Renal (REDINREN), Madrid, Spain

    Ignacio Revuelta & Beatriu Bayés

  6. Department of Sociology and GEPS, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Rosario Scandurra

Authors
  1. Joan Fernando
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  2. Ignacio Revuelta
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  3. Eva Palou
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  4. Rosario Scandurra
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  5. Beatriu Bayés
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  6. Joan Escarrabill
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joan Fernando.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose, nor any competing interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Ethical approval and Human and animal rights

The study was conducted in line with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human and animal rights experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008.

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Participant informed consent was obtained before data collection.

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Fernando, J., Revuelta, I., Palou, E. et al. Impact of pandemic mobility restrictions on kidney transplant patients’ experience: lessons on quality of care. J Nephrol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40620-024-01905-y

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