Welcome to the first edition of the KitNewCare Newsletter. KitNewCare is a European Union co-funded project bringing together clinical, academic and industry partners across Europe with a shared goal: making kidney healthcare more sustainable and climate-neutral, while maintaining the highest standards of patient care.

Dialysis is life-saving, but it is also one of the most resource-intensive treatments delivered by health systems, consuming large volumes of water and energy and generating significant waste. KitNewCare exists to change that arithmetic: by measuring the environmental footprint of kidney care, testing practical optimisations in real clinical settings, and building the tools, evidence and training needed to scale sustainable practice across Europe.

This newsletter will be your regular update on everything happening across KitNewCare: project news, scientific publications, participation in major conferences, and upcoming webinars and events from the project and its partners.

We're glad to have you with us for the first issue.

KitNewCare Team

KitNewCare is a proud contributor to the Kidney Care Sustainability Network (Kidney Care SusNet), run by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare.

Two webinars are scheduled over the coming months, all online, free to join:

Speaker: Prof Peter Stenvinkel – Dept of Renal Medicine, Karolinska University Hospital & Karolinska Institutet

Description: Reflections on planetary health, sustainability, and how biological intelligence and natural-systems thinking can shape healthier approaches to kidney care and healthcare more broadly.

Speaker: Julia Audije Gil (Fundación Renal Española) & Rodrigo Martínez Cadenas (IIS-FJD / UAM, KitNewCare)

Description: Integrated, evidence-based approaches to sustainable haemodialysis spanning clinical practice, service design and prevention, drawing on the experience of the Spanish Renal Foundation and Fundación Jiménez Díaz.

KitNewCare will be at the 8th Nordic Conference on Sustainable Healthcare, part of Sustainable Healthcare Week in Malmö, Sweden.

Our project coordinator, Prof Brett Duane (Trinity College Dublin), has been confirmed as a speaker in Parallel Session 1a – REDUCING: minimising waste, improving resource efficiency, optimising energy use, and embedding circular strategies, alongside:

• Nikolaj Lilholm Villadsen – Specialist, Danish Technological Institute
• Els van Herewegen – Associate Director ESG EMEA, BD
• More speakers to be confirmed

KitNewCare will also be joining the conference alongside two sister Horizon Europe projects, NetZeroAICT and CARING NATURE, as part of a proposed shared side event exploring measurement, digital innovation and operational change as three complementary routes to climate-neutral healthcare. We'll share the full story of this collaboration in the second edition of this newsletter.

ERA Congress 2026, Glasgow – June 2026

KitNewCare was at the centre of the sustainability conversation at ERA 2026, with five accepted abstracts and two invited lectures delivered by Karin Gerritsen (UMC Utrecht) and Frances Mortimer (Centre for Sustainable Healthcare), opening the Congress's dedicated sustainability session. Full details on the underlying research will follow in the Scientific Publications section of our next edition.

CleanMed Europe 2026 – Plenary Session

KitNewCare partnered with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare for a plenary session at CleanMed Europe (23–25 June 2026): “Sustainability in Clinical Practice: Building Knowledge Through Everyday Action” (23 June, 17:15–18:00 CEST). The session spotlighted real-world lessons in embedding sustainability into clinical practice, featuring practical examples from clinicians, professional networks and healthcare organisations. Dr Zuzanna Jakubowska (WUM) and Frances Mortimer (Centre for Sustainable Healthcare) shared the KitNewCare experience directly with the wider healthcare sustainability community.

Looking to build sustainability skills within your own team? The KitNewCare Sustainable Kidney Care Course, developed with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare, is completely free and available in four languages: English, Polish, Spanish, and Italian (Dutch is coming soon). Over six hours of interactive online learning, split into manageable sections, cover key concepts, theories and practical case studies on sustainability in kidney care.

The course helps nephrology professionals understand the environmental risks facing health systems, recognise kidney care's own contribution to that crisis, and apply sustainability principles in practice, from prevention strategies to reducing the environmental impact of dialysis and planning a sustainability project at your own workplace.

KitNewCare's scientific output is growing fast. Rather than anticipate results here, the consortium is uploading all outputs to a dedicated community on Zenodo as they become available, so that the full detail, data and citations are properly documented and easy to find in one place.

We'll bring you a full round-up of publications in the second edition of this newsletter.

In the meantime, follow and explore the KitNewCare Zenodo community to access publications and outputs as soon as they go live.