A patient perspective on the barriers to home dialysis

People with End Stage Renal Disease rarely choose home dialysis therapies even though they can offer a range of Quality-of-Life (QOL) benefits such as improved convenience, mental health well-being, employment, reduced mortality and cost effectiveness. Attempts to increase usage of such self-caring modalities, have met with limited success, in part due to a lack of understanding of patient decision making and patient perceived barriers to such therapies.

To explore the patient perspective on the main barriers to a range of self-care or home dialysis therapies, including Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis, Home Haemodialysis and Extended Home Haemodialysis.

A longitudinal patient narrative approach is adopted.

There are significant barriers to all aspects of informed decision making around home therapies, but many are based on perception. Creating decision aids and education programmes to tackle these perceived barriers, actively encouraging home therapy take up, focusing on QOL in clinical decision making, offering peer support and expanded in-centre self-care treatment options may increase awareness and uptake of self-care therapies.