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May 06, 2020: The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has published a new COVID-19 rapid guideline on acute kidney injury (AKI).
The purpose of this guideline is to help healthcare professionals prevent, detect and manage acute kidney injury in adults in hospital with known or suspected COVID-19.
This is important to improve outcomes and reduce the need for renal replacement therapy.
This guideline focuses on what you need to stop or start doing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Use it alongside your usual professional guidelines, standards and laws (including equalities, safeguarding, communication and mental capacity).
This guideline is for:
- health and care practitioners
- health and care staff involved in planning and delivering services
- commissioners.
The recommendations bring together:
- evidence from published literature on COVID-19 and acute kidney injury
- existing national and international guidance and policies (including NHS England’s specialty guides: clinical guide on acute kidney injury in hospitalised patients with COVID-19 outside the intensive care unit during the coronavirus pandemic and clinical guide on renal replacement therapy options in critical care during the coronavirus pandemic)
- advice from specialists working in the NHS from across the UK. These include people with expertise and experience of treating patients with acute kidney injury during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
NICE has developed these recommendations in direct response to the rapidly evolving situation and so could not follow the standard process for guidance development.
The guideline has been developed using the interim process and methods for developing rapid guidelines on COVID-19 and includes a systematic literature search.
The evidence tables for this search will be published alongside the guideline.
The recommendations are based on evidence and expert opinion and have been verified as far as possible. We will review and update the recommendations as to the knowledge base and expert experience develops.