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In 2019, Martyn Fredlund became the first ISN Reverse Fellow. He spent a year at the Mseleni Hospital in South Africa to train local health care providers using the tools developed by the ISN 0by25 pilot study.

Dr. Fredlund offered acute kidney injury training across ten community health centers as part of the Kidney Care Network (KCN) project throughout June and July 2019. The education provided to the nursing teams was paramount to improving success-rates, and the implementation of point of care creatinine testing increased opportunities to better detect and manage acute kidney injury.

As the site investigator for the Kidney Care Network project for the Mseleni site, Dr. Fredlund set up a qualitative project and supervised the ethics application process. He found “exciting” the opportunity to get involved in research projects that have an immediate impact on the patients and acknowledged that international work made him “consider the research more carefully to ascertain which areas of care were essential and evidence-based, and which were cultural.”

Dr. Fredlund stated that the experience had provided him with valuable insight into the difficulties of improving renal care in rural low-income settings, concluding: “This will be extremely helpful to me in my future as a consultant and in my ongoing involvement with the ISN. I would recommend to my colleagues to consider applying for a reverse fellowship in view of the wide experience it has enabled me to have.”