Enter and view: The Sussex Kidney Unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital
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Healthwatch Brighton and Hove undertook an enter and view visit on 19 August 2025 to the Sussex Kidney Unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in response to findings from a 2024 survey (PREM), led by The UK Kidney Association in partnership with Kidney Care UK, to listen to patients’ concerns in more depth. They spoke to 14 patients.
Overall, Healthwatch survey findings reveal that dialysis patients are generally happy with the Sussex Kidney Unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. Patients scored communication highly overall (average score of 5.37/7.00) and there were many positive comments about the care they receive as well as an awareness of the constraints of the system. One patient was so pleased with their care, they said they were hesitant to move as they were concerned that they wouldn’t find as good of a renal team elsewhere.
However, upon further discussion and when asked about more specific areas of care, patients did indicate some improvements that could be made. There were some quite mixed and polarised opinions about communications in some areas such as test results, dietary advice, and life goals discussion. Some explanations for this could be personal preference in how much detail they like to hear and how they like to be communicated with, different treatment rooms and/or different staff providing a different patient experience, and length of time the patient has been in renal care and the severity of their condition.
The audit involved visiting the outpatients waiting room, the Stirling day case unit, the four main haemodialysis rooms, and the dialysis waiting room. Healthwatch scored all areas aside from the dialysis waiting room highly for the environments being welcoming, safe, caring, well-organised and calm. Scores were six out of ten for the dialysis waiting room, due to storage, information, and safety issues, but ranged between eight and ten for the other areas. The smallest haemodialysis room (room 1) lowered the results for its section as it felt cramped and cluttered.
85% of patients said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the environment. However, they raised some concerns around the dialysis waiting room, parking, dialysis room 1 being cramped, ceiling tiles and the broken lift.