The health services research undertaken by the Bristol Renal Research group can best be summarised as ‘translational public health research’ – we use epidemiology and in-depth qualitative approaches to generate hypotheses and optimise trial designs and then translate the evidence of those trials into evidence of improvement in population (kidney) health.

Underpinning this programme is the UK Renal Registry, which has been hosted in Bristol since its inception in 1995 and has a long track record of delivering clinically important epidemiological data on treatment rates for end-stage kidney disease. This work has been transformed with the increasing involvement of the methodological experts at University of Bristol’s Population Health Sciences.

Current research activity focuses on understanding and improving: access to and outcomes with end-stage kidney disease treatment; the evidence base for ‘pseudo’ randomised controlled trials in kidney disease using observational data, and; patient priorities during decision making and the tailoring of communication during that process. These topics require a broad range of research methods – evidence synthesis, survey design, qualitative research, statistics and epidemiology – and are supported by a number of competitively awarded research grants, PhDs and post-doctoral fellowships.