Kidney disease: data introduction

Table 1 shows the dimensions and geographies for which chronic kidney disease (CKD) and renal replacement therapy (RRT) data are available, either within the data pages which follow or through hyperlinks.

Table 1: Data for Scotland presented on the kidney disease data pages

Acute kidney injury (AKI) data

Data on AKI is not currently published from routine national data sources in Scotland. The UK Renal Registry has published a report on AKI in England using AKI warning test scores collected in 2018.

Kidney disease data in hospital records

National reporting of CKD and AKI data is hampered by the fact that hospital discharge records are generally poor for identifying people with CKD (Robertson et al. 2014) and AKI (Sawhney et al. 2015, Kerr et al. 2014) compared with laboratory data. 

There are a number of possible reasons for this. Identifying CKD from hospital discharge records obviously requires an admission to hospital, but those most often admitted are likely to have more advanced renal disease, more comorbidity and more complications. This also makes it more likely that renal disease will be recognised during the admission episode. In other cases CKD/AKI may not be the main reason for admission, and therefore may not be recorded in discharge documents. In addition, the ICD10 codes for kidney diseases lack specificity, and there is some variation in how the codes are applied.