National and regional asthma programmes in Europe

Abstract

This review presents seven national asthma programmes to support the European Asthma Research and Innovation Partnership in developing strategies to reduce asthma mortality and morbidity across Europe. From published data it appears that in order to influence asthma care, national/regional asthma programmes are more effective than conventional treatment guidelines. An asthma programme should start with the universal commitments of stakeholders at all levels and the programme has to be endorsed by political and governmental bodies. When the national problems have been identified, the goals of the programme have to be clearly defined with measures to evaluate progress. An action plan has to be developed, including defined re-allocation of patients and existing resources, if necessary, between primary care and specialised healthcare units or hospital centres. Patients should be involved in guided self-management education and structured follow-up in relation to disease severity. The three evaluated programmes show that, thanks to rigorous efforts, it is possible to improve patients' quality of life and reduce hospitalisation, asthma mortality, sick leave and disability pensions. The direct and indirect costs, both for the individual patient and for society, can be significantly reduced. The results can form the basis for development of further programme activities in Europe. @ERSpublications Current asthma programmes confirm patients' quality of life can be improved while significantly reducing costs

AIRWAYS-ICPs (European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing) from concept to implementation

“…• Proposing a common framework of care pathways (ICPs) for CRDs to facilitate comparability and trans-national initiatives targeted to all populations according to culture, health systems and income [12]: AIRWAYS-ICPs is participating in the development of a repository that is currently being developed by the EU and that will be available in December 2015. This repository will include good practices in CRDs such as National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE; UK) guidance, national programmes for CRDs [13], asthma, COPD or allergy [14][15][16], guidelines for asthma, COPD or allergic rhinitis [10,[17][18][19][20], and ICPs.…”

Selected Aspects of Medical Care for Patients with Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in Poland

“…In contrast, the analogous rates in the whole of the European Union are estimated to be 8.2 % among adults and 9.2% in children [2]. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is most commonly caused by active rather than passive exposure to tobacco smoke, and mainly affects people aged 40 years or more.…”

“…Although a systematic increase in the number of COPD and asthma patients was observed in the late XX century [1][2][3], the last decade has seen a stabilisation of this incidence rate [4,5]. The practical and social costs associated with these two conditions remain high, especially in regard www.journals.viamedica.pl to patients with severe asthma, or those with frequent exacerbator phenotype suffering from COPD [4,5].…”

“…The knowledge possessed by the doctors and its regular updating, appear to be also imperfect [13]. Several such studies highlight the need for diligent and systematic training of the medical and paramedical personnel [2,3,6,13].…”

“…This relationship has direct implications not only on the national budget, but mainly on the effectiveness of treating individual patients [2,3,6,7,11]. Therefore, the present study evaluates the quality of medical treatment provided for these groups of patients, with a two-level system of health care.…”