Many transplant recipients may experience physical and emotional symptoms, such as anxiety, fatigue, sleep problems, pain, etc. Often, these symptoms are not reported or managed well, and can affect a patient's quality-of-life. Transplant recipients are grateful for the "gift of life" but physical and emotional symptoms reduce their quality-of-life. Transplant recipients and caregivers have felt unprepared for the ongoing symptoms and reduced quality-of-life post-transplant.
One way of monitoring and managing these symptoms is using the Emotion And Symptom-focused Engagement (EASE) intervention. EASE was originally developed for patients with acute leukemia and has begun to be adapted to help monitor and manage physical and emotional symptoms for organ transplant recipients.
EASE is comprised of two components:
1. Psychological - 8 supportive counselling sessions delivered by mental health clinicians to address concerns about mental health, losses from organ failure, coping with a transplant, experiences with living on the brink of death for a prolonged period of time, etc. 2. Physical - Regular assessments of physical symptoms using questionnaires and referral to healthcare professionals for symptom management as necessary.
EASE uses questionnaires, also called patient reported outcome measures (PROMs), for symptom assessment and monitoring. PROMs measure symptom severity, similarly to how bloodwork measures organ functioning. PROMs, as part of EASE, will ask recipients questions and help identify relevant physical, emotional, and social symptoms to enhance their care.
With the help of specialists, patients, and support from the Kidney Foundation of Canada, our team has begun to adapt the EASE intervention for transplant recipients. In order to finalize the adaptation of the EASE intervention for use in a routine transplant clinic, we are launching a pre-pilot study to gain real-life experience from managing symptoms of SOT recipients with the use of EASE-SOT.
Participants consented pre-transplant: Potential transplant recipients who are listed on the waitlist and are identified by pre-transplant staff, recipients who have a living donor arranged (pertaining to kidney and liver recipients), participants currently completely pre-transplant prehabilitation (pertaining to lung and heart recipients), or those who are on the top of their respective organ transplant waitlists.
Participants consented post-transplant: Incident kidney, kidney-pancreas, liver, lung, or heart transplant recipients identified during index transplant hospital admission at the inpatient transplant unit of the Ajmera Transplant Centre at Toronto General Hospital
Patients in ICU.
Patients who are clinically unstable, have delirium or other severe mental health concern requiring psychiatric treatment - assessed by clinical team.
Non-English speaking patients.
Severe cognitive impairment as assessed by the recruitment and/or research team. This will be determined through communication with the organ transplant teams and by checking the patient's medical charts. If no cognitive impairment is indicated by the patients organ transplant team or is documented in their medical chart, the patient will be assessed to have no cognitive impairment.