Perfectionism, self-compassion and intuitive eating within the context of chronic kidney disease and renal transplantation

Approximately 3 million people in the UK have chronic kidney disease (CKD), a condition characterised by a long-term deterioration in kidney functioning (Datta & Ogbeide, 2019; Kidney Care UK, 2017; NICE, 2015). At the end of 2017, 64,887 adults in the UK were receiving renal replacement therapy (haemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis or kidney transplant) as a result (UK Renal Registry, 2019) and as of March 2020, 4,748 people are on the UK waiting list for a kidney transplant (NHS Blood and Transplant, 2020). CKD has been estimated to cost the NHS £1.23 billion a year, mostly through expenditure in relation to dialysis and transplants (Kerr et al., 2012) and is also associated with an estimated £3380 increase per person in hospital costs during the last 12 months of the person's life (Kerr et al., 2017). The Kidney Health: Delivering Excellence report (Kidney Health, 2013) has identified self-management of CKD as an important focus for research and this is particularly pertinent given that there is an increased prevalence of depression and anxiety within people with CKD (Shirazian et al., 2017) which in turn can have a detrimental effect on treatment compliance (DiMatteo et al., 2000; Lacson et al., 2012), kidney function (Tsai et al., 2012) and all-cause mortality (Palmer et al., 2013).
This PhD will use a mixed-methods approach to examine how the personality constructs of perfectionism and self-compassion affect the health and health-related behaviours (including intuitive eating) of people with CKD who are living with a successful kidney transplant. The Stress and Coping Cyclical Amplification Model of Perfectionism in Illness (SCCAMPI; Molnar, Sirois & Methot-Jones, 2016) contends that perfectionism can have a detrimental effect on health and health-related behaviours via a number of pathways, one of which is reduced levels of self-compassion (Linnett & Kibowski, 2020). The planned research will use the SCCAMPI to interpret the relationship between perfectionism, self-compassion and intuitive eating within renal transplant patients with a view to generating a greater understanding of how psychological factors can influence the self-management of individuals with CKD.