The College of Community Health Sciences partnered with UA’s Capstone College of Nursing for a Feb. 28 event, “Preventing and Managing Chronic Kidney Disease: Strategies for Providers and People at Risk,” to provide education strategies for physicians and community members about chronic kidney disease.
Dr. Pamela Payne-Foster, a preventive medicine and public health physician and professor of community medicine and population health with CCHS, works with other faculty from CCN to raise awareness about chronic kidney disease.
“This event was to premiere some of the tools our team and I developed for the kidney study we did,” Payne-Foster said.
UA faculty, students, researchers and members of the community attended the event.
An estimated 1 in 7 American adults have chronic kidney disease, a condition where the kidneys are damaged and cannot filter blood properly through the body. People with or at risk of CKD can develop complications such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Testing for CKD is done with blood and urine tests performed by a primary care physician or a nephrologist, a doctor who specializes in kidney care and diseases of the kidneys.
Also at the February event, Dr. Felicia Wood, a professor with CCN, provided information about the team’s research project, which focuses on racial health inequities of kidney disease treatments, with the goal of developing and implementing an intervention to decrease those inequities.
As part of efforts to raise awareness about CKD, Payne-Foster and her team created health information videos to explain what the disease is, its risk factors and steps people can take for testing and treatment. The team also developed an app that will be available in April 2024 and enable primary care physicians to determine the stage of CKD in their patients.
In addition, the event also featured a panel discussion by two community members with CKD, a nephrologist, and the executive director of the Alabama Kidney Foundation. Panel members also answered questions from the audience.
