Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) is an international organization whose mission is to improve the care and outcomes of kidney disease patients worldwide by promoting coordination, collaboration, and integration of initiatives to develop and implement clinical practice guidelines.  Periodically, KDIGO hosts conferences on topics of importance to patients with kidney disease.  These conferences are designed to review the state of the art on a focused subject and to ask conference participants to determine what needs to be done in this area to improve patient care and outcomes.  Sometimes the recommendations from these conferences lead to KDIGO guideline efforts and other times they highlight areas for which additional research is needed to produce evidence that might lead to guidelines in the future.

The development of a system of integrated supportive/palliative care is urgently required to provide quality care for those with long‐term chronic illnesses such as advanced CKD in which multiple co‐morbidities among older people will dominate palliative care in the future. To achieve international, multidisciplinary, transparent and unbiased analysis, KDIGO brought together experts from around the world at the Controversies Conference on Supportive/Palliative Care in CKD.

The KDIGO Controversies Conference on Supportive/Palliative Care in CKD took place in Mexico City, Mexico on December 6-8, 2013.  Renal Palliative Care experts Drs. Sara Davison of the University of Alberta, Canada and Gregorio Obrador of the Universidad Panamericana School of Medicine, Mexico co‐chaired this conference.