EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL TRANSPLANTATION

End-stage renal disease is a significant worldwide health concern, and its progression is accompanied by several serious complications, including anemia, cardiovascular disease, and hyperlipidemia. Therefore, patients should undergo therapeutic methods such as hemodialysis and kidney transplantation to reduce complications, comorbidities, and mortality.¹
Because of high costs and complications such as infection, long dependency on hemodialysis machine, and accompanying psychological problems, patients prefer kidney transplantation to dialysis.² Never-theless, kidney transplant recipients also encounter negative issues, such as difficult drug regimen adherence and its side effects, tedious visits, infection probability, and fear of organ rejection and death from it, which affect the quality of life³ of transplant recipients as a valuable indicator of their health status.³
Quality of life is based on a patient’s sense of well-being, and quality of life is usually used as an important clinical index for the efficiency of medical treatments for patients.⁴ Therefore, improving quality of life helps the patient, not only in reducing their hospital stay and medical costs, but also in promoting their active lifestyle, self-esteem, and self-care capacity.⁵
Self-care education is a non-medical method that can be used to promote quality of life in patients undergoing kidney transplantation. Self-care educa-tion is an important part of all care plans that facilitates the process of a practice in which individuals use consciousness, knowledge, and ability to take care of themselves for the promotion of their economic and social situation and that of their families. It is very important to fulfill education based on educational priorities in society.⁶
Obstacles to education are lack of time at discharge time, communication barriers, volume of educational materials, interruptions to the training process and repetition of learning concepts, cultural differences, low adherence to self-care education, and psychological consequences of disease.⁷
Policymakers and health care administrators have a critical and multifaceted task of supporting self-care education as a new and vital pathway to significantly improve the quality of life of kidney transplant recipients.⁸ This task requires designing an educational framework and creating a supportive health care infrastructure through legislation and funding. In addition, policymakers and health care administrators should work on reimbursement methods for educational services, encourage health care systems to train staff, emphasize patient education in self-care, and promote research on effective interventions in this area.⁹
In general, it is important to equip patients with practical knowledge about complex medication adherence, thorough infection prevention, dietary management, and recognition of critical symptoms that indicate graft rejection or complications. Such knowledge will empower patients to become active partners in reducing avoidable complications and readmissions, maximizing transplant longevity, and, most importantly, regaining independence and self-confidence in their lives.

Volume: 24 Issue: 6 June 2026

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