Abstract. The National Kidney Disease Education Program (NDKEP) is a program of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. It seeks to increase awareness of CKD among high risk groups and primary care providers. The NKDEP is a response to the rapidly escalating incidence of ESRD in the United States in the face of new treatment to prevent and mitigate CKD. The hope is that awareness will lead to action, testing, and treatment.The impetus for a National Kidney Disease Education Program (NDKEP) derives from three observations. First, the number of people with ESRD is increasing such that it now represents a significant public health burden. Second, clinically valid approaches for detecting, preventing, and slowing the progression to ESRD are widely available. Third, these approaches are sparsely used in practice.In 2000, approximately 100,000 people were projected to develop ESRD. Adding these people to the prevalent ESRD population yielded a total of about 380,000. Of these, approximately 80,000 were alive with a functioning renal transplant; the remainder were on dialysis. The number of people developing ESRD has doubled each decade for the last two decades with annual increases of 6 to 8%. The projections suggest that over 600,000 people will have ESRD by the year 2010. Because transplantation rates have remained plateaued at around 13,000/yr, the projected 175,000 people developing ESRD in 2010 will essentially all be maintained on one form of dialysis or another (1). Currently, the incidence of ESRD exceeds the death rate from any cancer except lung cancer. Furthermore, with annual mortality for patients on dialysis in the range of 20%, more people die with treated uremia than with any cancer, except for lung cancer. If current trends continue, by 2010, the toll of ESRD will exceed that of lung cancer (2).This burden of disease is paralleled by the enormous cost for delivering ESRD care. The total costs of treating people for ESRD in 1999 were $17.9 billion. This figure includes not only the cost of dialysis, or transplant care, but also the associated medical expenditures incurred by this large patient group. Furthermore, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expends approximately 6% of its entire budget on reimbursements for people with ESRD, whereas those people represent less than 1% of the CMS beneficiaries. For compar-

The National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) is a federally sponsored national partnership including government, nonprofit, professional, and private sector organizations. The NDEP uses social marketing principles and processes to develop and implement awareness campaigns and educational activities to improve the treatment and health status of people with diabetes. Co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NDEP launched its “Control Your Diabetes. For Life.” awareness campaign in 1998. The campaign was designed to educate the millions of Americans with diabetes and their social supporters about the seriousness of diabetes, ways to control the disease, and the benefits of good glucose control. The NDEP conducted extensive audience research and applied behavior change theories and the social marketing framework to design, implement, and evaluate the campaign. From 1998 to 2003, the campaign achieved at least 700 million media impressions with its culturally appropriate television and radio public service announcements, print ads, and newspaper and magazine stories. In addition, over half of people with diabetes indicated awareness of the campaign and NDEP has tracked positive trends in practice of blood glucose testing and awareness of the A1C (also known as the hemoglobin A1C), the best measure of blood glucose control, since the campaign's launch.

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