Kidney Transplant Critical Care Manual

Kidney Transplant Critical Care Manual

Transplant Critical Care Series — Volume 4 of 4

A kidney graft rarely fails for one dramatic reason. It fails in the accumulated small decisions of the first thirty days — a urine output misread, a rejection caught late, a drug level left unchecked. This manual is built for exactly that window: a checklist-driven bedside reference that turns the entire transplant pathway into fast, confident, hour-by-hour decisions when graft survival depends on getting each one right.

What’s inside

• Pre-transplant recipient evaluation — eGFR thresholds, cardiovascular workup, and immunological assessment including PRA and donor-specific antibodies
• Donor assessment — living and deceased donor criteria, with KDPI/KDRI scoring
• Perioperative protocols — surgical, anaesthetic, and intraoperative fluid management
• Day 0 to Day 30 ICU/HDU framework — a day-by-day plan organised around urine output as the graft’s primary signal
• Delayed graft function — recognition and management pathway
• Rejection protocols — acute cellular and antibody-mediated rejection, using Banff 2019 classification
• Complication chapters — calcineurin inhibitor nephrotoxicity, BK virus nephropathy, and urological complications
• Complete immunosuppression & drug-monitoring reference — targets and adjustments in one place

Educational reference only — always follow your unit’s local protocols and clinical judgement.

By Dr. Gunadhar Padhi — Chief Intensivist, MD, IDCCM, FCCCM, ECMO (Paris); author of the EDIC preparation series.