Renal Association Clinical Practice Guideline on the assessment of the potential kidney transplant recipient.

This clinical practice guideline addresses access to kidney transplantation together with the evaluation, selection and preparation of the potential kidney transplant recipient. Guidance on the medical management of the kidney transplant recipient is provided in another module of the Renal Association guidelines available at www.renal.org. Readers should refer to the joint British Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics/ British Transplantation Society document for guidelines on the detection and characterisation of HLA antibodies in renal transplantation and to the NHS Blood and Transplant/British Transplantation Society guidelines for consent for solid organ transplantation (www.bts.org. uk/standards-and-guidelines.htm) [1]. In this guideline Chronic Kidney Disease stage 5 (CKD 5) includes pre-dialysis and transplant patients with eGFR <15ml/min/1.73m as well as patients on dialysis i.e. CKD 5, CKD 5Tand CKD 5D. This guideline is an updated version of the Renal Association guidance developed by the same lead co-authors published in 2007 and is based on a review of the literature between 2007 and 2010. Where evidence was available from RCTs and systematic reviews recommendations were based on these publications. Where there was a lack of evidence from high-quality studies, recommendations were based on the best available evidence taking in account the previous clinical practice guidelines on evaluation of the potential kidney transplant recipient from North America [2] and the European Renal Best Practice (ERBP) guidelines for renal transplantation [3].