Welcome to LAKPA

The Lister Area Kidney Patients Association (LAKPA) is a small charity dedicated to improving the lives of kidney patients and their families served by the Lister Hospital in Stevenage. Lister Hospital provides a wide range of services to over 900 kidney patients; including pre-dialysis/transplant, dialysis, assessment for living donors and transplantation and post transplantation. It manages dialysis units at the Lister, St Albans, Luton & Dunstable and Harlow Hospitals and at a dialysis unit in Bedford.

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We rely on the support of our volunteers

LAKPA is run entirely by volunteers, all of whom have had their life impacted by kidney disease and has developed strong working relationships with clinical and support staff across the renal unit. We all recognise that a kidney diagnosis is life changing and it is important to provide emotional support alongside the medical.

Our Priorities

To make sure that our work is effective our priorities this year are:

• Provide additional financial support to patients and carers in need and increase support for social activities for them in the context of Covid. Provide financial support where this is needed.
• Allied to the above we will manage and allocate the funding from Tom’s bequest, taking account of the responses to the patient survey.
• Home therapies remains a LAKPA priority, as it is for Dr Jeevaratnam and his team. We will be supporting plans to renovate the Home Therapies Unit at the Lister over the next 12 months.
• Patient transport continues to be an issue. We are in contact with both the ICS’s that cover our area. Both are in the process of undertaking a procurement process for new contracts to commence in 2024. LAKPA are invited to provide input into the development of the specification and will strongly represent the patient view.
• Strengthen LAKPA by raising the profile by recruiting more members, strengthen communication, improve notice boards etc.

Your donations and how we use them

LAKPA’s whole focus is to support our kidney patients to help improve their lives and the donations we receive are all used for this end. In addition to supporting the renal consultants with equipment that they need, we have helped individual patients who have been affected by the pandemic or by family emergencies.

We have provided start up finance for the renal support team in developing services such as the peer support programme and the benefits adviser amongst others. We also know that life needs to have fun in it, so we provide the various units with funds to buy Christmas decorations and, where we can, we support other Christmas festivities.

We also encourage and subsidise summer outings and parties. We realise too just how important communication is as kidney disease can feel very isolating.

We hope that this website and the thrice yearly Newsletter, which is sent free to every member, goes some way to helping you to feel connected. These are just some of the ways in which we use the money you so kindly donate.