Chronic Respiratory Patients
The importance of priority healthcare for chronic respiratory patients
The need to promote a national strategy
Last Wednesday, a document prepared by Chiesi Spain entitled “Consensus for Equity in Respiratory Health” was published.
This report includes recommendations for its implementation in Spain: the objective is to show the inequalities in the approach to highly prevalent pathologies.
Similarly, it highlights the need to promote new measures to achieve a consensus in the care of respiratory patients. This would have an effect on reducing social determinants of health.
Needs identified in chronic respiratory patients
The public healthcare system is free and decentralized; each Autonomous Community manages its resources independently.
Currently, scientific societies, professional associations, and patient groups have expressed the need to address the social determinants of health that affect millions of patients with respiratory illnesses.
The primary goal in managing respiratory illnesses is early diagnosis; however, primary care is overwhelmed.
For this reason, strengthening primary care and improving its coordination with specialized medical care is crucial.
If specialists recorded the social determinants of health in patients’ medical records, it would be easier to tailor care to their individual circumstances.
Optimization of the patient care system
Patients need changes:
- More than seven million people in Spain suffer from asthma, COPD, and other chronic respiratory illnesses that significantly impact their daily lives.
- Respiratory diseases are chronic, progressive, and debilitating conditions that have a major impact on patients and their families.
- These illnesses can affect everything from performing basic daily activities, such as going outside or showering, to mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
- These patients are also more vulnerable to viruses and infections.
The environment in chronic respiratory patients
The air quality of the environment in which the patient is located influences their quality of life, for example, the humidity of the environment or pollution.
On the other hand, access to specialist care is geographically limited, especially for people living far from major cities.
For this reason, it is necessary to educate society about preventative healthcare.
“If we want to reduce the impact of these diseases, we must act earlier, starting in childhood.”
Some diseases cannot be prevented, but early diagnosis and timely treatment can slow their development or progression, improving the patient’s quality of life and survival.
This is alsoMain objectivevisits to primary care centers by people with respiratory illnesses is 1.4 times higher.
Main objective
Patient Care
Comprehensive patient healthcare is the first recommendation of the consensus.
An approach that emphasizes “everyone working together, with coordination between different levels of care,” and strengthening the role of respiratory nursing.
Secondly, facilitating early diagnosis of these diseases, “starting with suspicion in primary care and, if a definitive diagnosis is not possible, referring to a specialist.”
Synergy among medical specialists, nurses, and pharmacists is key to working in the right direction, as is educating the public.
Centralizing data for access to information in electronic health records is the path to achieving better results with less effort.
Furthermore, it is important to launch health promotion and anti-smoking campaigns; smoking, along with increasingly changeable weather patterns with alternating periods of cold and heat, exacerbates respiratory illnesses.
Access to Treatments
The document also highlights the importance of promoting equitable access to treatment, as well as the incorporation of cost-effective therapeutic innovations.
It further emphasizes the importance of promoting therapeutic education programs and recommendations for healthy lifestyle habits.
On the other hand, it recommends launching awareness campaigns in all autonomous communities to strengthen respiratory health prevention and promotion.
Experts agree that early diagnosis of respiratory diseases facilitates timely treatment and better health outcomes, making it possible to alter the natural course of the disease.
Conclusions
For all these reasons, the document concludes by adding recommendations regarding the establishment of quality health outcome indicators.
The objective is to allow the autonomous communities to measure and evaluate, using the same common and agreed-upon criteria, the efficiency of chronic respiratory patient management.
Finally, the analysis recommends assigning the State Public Health Agency the task of defining a unified methodology for continuously analyzing and monitoring the impact of all the social determinants of health on respiratory diseases.
Furthermore, it seeks to identify data on the social determinants of health, all from a multidisciplinary and inter-regional perspective.