The DAYLife Peritoneal Dialysis (PD) Mentoring Programme recently brought teams together for its first face-to-face development day, marking an important milestone for the national initiative supporting collaboration, shared learning and quality improvement in home dialysis care.
DAYLife – Dialysis at Yours – is a national home dialysis initiative that brings together kidney professionals to share learning, support service improvement and promote best practice in home dialysis care. The PD Mentoring Programme is one of several initiatives designed to help centres strengthen and develop their local services.
Current mentor and mentee partnerships involved in the programme include:
- Edinburgh / Nottingham
- Sheffield / Salford
- Peterborough / St Helier
- Exeter / Oxford
- Bradford / Dorset
- Basildon / Shrewsbury
Building local improvement projects
The development day combined practical teaching sessions with collaborative workshops, allowing teams to begin shaping their local improvement projects and work through challenges together.
Sessions explored a wide range of QI methods and tools, and mentor centres also shared practical examples from their own PD services, including what had worked well, challenges encountered and lessons learned.
The workshops allowed participating centres to start developing project plans focused on local priorities and barriers to PD growth. Mentee centres also presented early ideas to the wider group, helping to encourage discussion and shared learning between teams.
Supporting shared learning
A central part of the programme is the DAYLife Knowledge Hub, which provides participating teams with practical resources and project materials throughout the initiative. Resources shared following the development day include presentation slides, fishbone and driver diagram tools, measurement templates, project scope documents, PDSA resources and action-planning materials to support ongoing work.
The programme will now continue through monthly mentor–mentee meetings, supported by structured project updates reviewed by the DAYLife team. Participating centres will also receive ongoing support through planned unit visits and future virtual group sessions.
The next group meeting will see participating centres present their developing project plans to the wider cohort. Alongside the mentoring partnerships, centres will continue to access QI training delivered by KQIP (the Kidney Quality Improvement Partnership), mentoring skills training from the Royal College of Physicians, and opportunities to share learning through DAYLife and national kidney meetings, including UK Kidney Week.