Health education for the asthmatic patient and caregiver from the nursing perspective

Summary

Asthma is known as an inflammatory disease which impacts lung functions. In this condition, affected patient’s nostrils become inflamed, narrow and swollen, making it difficult for them to breathe correctly. Some common symptoms of Asthma include coughing, dyspnea, recurring bronchitis, and wheezing. Therefore, Asthma impacts a person’s life as well as their physical and mental health. The statistics reveal that approximately 3000 people died from Asthma attack due to lack of care and exact knowledge. Unfortunately, many asthmatic patients are uninformed about the disease itself. Whereas, nursing caregivers also do not have enough knowledge for dealing with such patients. Due to poor health education patients does not know self-management techniques for their problems. Whereas, new nursing practitioners do not know much either. As a result, people are still suffering from chronic disease due to lack of understanding. This project proposes a new way through which nursing practitioners could understand Asthma. Further, they could have excellent communication with patients on chronic diseases. The nurses will have a complete understanding of Asthma; types approaches patient communication on diseases, medical supervision.

This project has the title, “Health education for the asthmatic patient and caregiver from the nursing perspective.” This new way is a workshop on Asthma education programs. The workshop project will explain new and potential nurse practitioners on disease asthma. While, symptoms, causes, types, medical care, and communication methods. Several patients visit the hospital frequently with different questions. However, the lack of experience of nurses makes it more challenging to understand the real problem. Another issue is that sometimes doctors are unavailable because of different duties. Whereas, children are often confused to react to certain conditions in schools, playground when Asthma comes up. The caregivers must have proper training and knowledge so that explanation to new patients and their families could become accessible. With adequate communication methods, nurses could adequately explain about chronic diseases and their preventive measures.

The workshop will be a three-day process and involve explanation, and demonstration on protective measures against Asthma. It is important to conduct such workshops explaining everything to nurse practitioners. Hence, the workshop will bring awareness of asthma self-management. The project aims to empower the medical, healthcare and caregiving professionals for serving patients delicately and effectively. Furthermore, to bring awareness of asthma management through proper understanding and knowledge. Not only the nursing department but patients themselves will be able to regulate and control asthma attacks. The expectation is that the workshop will be a cost-effective approach was providing caregivers to complete training of chronic disease. The purpose will be not to affect hospital workspace and pressure nursing staff. However, explain them properly on how to aide and resolve queries of affected patients. We will implement this workshop in Apollo Spectra Hospital, Mumbai, situated in the country India.

Introduction

Asthma is a long-term disease that reduces the working of the lungs. Further, it is also known as a chronic respiratory disease because of producing inflammation, narrowness and swelling in the nostrils. There are several symptoms of Asthma such as wheezing, coughing, breath shortness, tightening in the chest, difficulty in talking. Whereas, different types of Asthma which could occur into adult and children like allergy-induced, Exercise-induced Cough-Variant Asthma, Occupational Asthma, Nocturnal Asthma, Bronchoconstriction (EIB) Asthma and Nonallergic Asthma (Natale, 2019). Hence, the types change as per the symptoms of coughing and wheezing. These diseases mainly reduce the lives of people and bring death quickly due to lack of healthcare.

According to the Global Asthma Report 2018, around 339 million people get affected by Asthma in all parts of the world and ranked among 28^th among the leading cause of burden disease (Global Asthma Network, 2018). It is a severe issue globally and thus requires proper aide and education. Health education has become a bigger concern and has relative importance for asthma management. Due to lack of resources and additional programs, people are still unaware of chronic diseases. Whereas, the nursing department is also completely uninformed in hospitals. Several healthcare professionals and caregivers do not know using an inhaler. In some countries, asthma medicines are not available, affordable, unreliable quality, as well as no effective management (Global Asthma Network, 2018). Therefore, nursing practitioners should have proper guidance for treating non-communicable diseases.

The governments already initiate several programs to aide asthma concerns in health settings. The 41 per cent workshops for asthma management programs and centres opened in Brazil for public health strategies, family healthcare, outreach, humanising practises, and health care agent visits (Stelmach et al., 2015). Thus, programs help make families aware of the patient’s health conditions; while, healthcare professionals have also made some other programs for the patient’s recovery. For instance, self-management programs for asthma patients offer them personal asthma action plan under patient/clinician partnerships (Fawcett, Porritt, Campbell & Carson, 2017). This example demonstrates an aide for patients from nursing perspectives. The parents are highly concerned with their children and asthma problems. Hence, it is vital to provide them with complete information.

On the contrary, these short programs are not helpful in the long run for hospitals. The lack of awareness brings parents to the hospital emergency department every time. As per one research, parents do not accept the professional healthcare authority for information and goes to somewhere else to gain knowledge about children’s chronic respiratory disease (Finnvold, 2010). This scenario is massive trouble because of which affected patient’s health goes into the disturbance. Henceforth, this project proposes a three-day workshop for nursing practitioners on asthma health education. As a result, they will be able to communicate with the patient and their families about non-communicable diseases such as Asthma. The main objective to provide training to new nursing staff on Asthma and using communication methods to patients and their caregivers in a low-cost manner.

Background

India is a diverse country with different caste, groups, regions and religions living as one secular nation. However, healthcare services are complicated to reach to the people affected by diseases. Out of 1.31 billion Indians, 6 per cent children and 2 per cent adults have Asthma with no health insurance facilities due to healthcare facilities gap between lower and higher class (“The Global Asthma Report 2018”, 2018). It shows some affected patients are unable to use health education due to being low-income families.

Whereas, India consists of rural as well as urban areas that require healthcare services. Sixty per cent of hospitals are built in urban areas with professionals such as doctors and nurses with adequate help. However, rural areas are less informed and lack healthcare services, hospitals and other dispensary facilities. In the rural areas, deficient infrastructure for health provides one hospital bed for every 2,046 individuals, one government doctor for 10,000 people and one state-run hospital for each 90, 243 citizens (Kashyap, 2017). Thus, lower healthcare services and lower-income families bring asthma problems for people in a country like India.

Another thing which is responsible for producing epidemic such as chronic respiratory disease is climatic condition disturbance. On the contrary, as per the world health organisation, India has approximately 20 cities that provide a large amount of air pollution every day (World Health Organisation, 2019). Seven hundred million people, including men, women and children, suffer from air pollution due inhaling of smoke, biomass, kerosene stoves, crop residues, and sulphur oxides (Sharma, 2017). As a result, Asthma has become a global epidemic for India due to pollution problems.

Furthermore, working professionals in hospitals are unaware of using asthma inhalers on patients. As per one study, Metered Dose Inhaler was used poorly as per test of the nursing interns and doctors for asthma prevention in tertiary care hospital, Mumbai (Mullerpattan et al., 2016). Thus, our proposed project offers a solution for reducing such human errors of nursing practitioners effectively. The project design is for Apollo Spectra Hospital branch situated in the city of Mumbai. This healthcare organisation provides service with 16 beds, four modular operation theatres, in-house pharmacy, and 145 healthcare professionals (Apollo Spectra Hospital, 2019). Hence, aim to provide workshop training to nursing staff for Asthma, and it’s preventive measures.

Justification and Objective of the Study

The objectives of the study should have an explanation before the beginning of the project life-cycle. Hence, before planning project activities, objectives of the project workshop is defined in the following table. It follows the SMART objectives and presents the goals such as specific, measurable, attenable, relevant and time-bound.

• Specific: The purpose of our study to make healthcare professionals aware of Asthma as a non-communicable disease. Hence, the research focuses explicitly on doing a 3-day workshop to provide complete information to the nurse practitioners on asthma attacks, types, and use of devices.
• Measurable: The entire nursing staff is approximately 50 on which this study will be conducted.
• Attenable: The study is attenable and efficient for healthcare professionals.
• Relevant: Currently, Asthma attacks have become quite often in India due to air pollution, and this study seems appropriate and effective to propose.
• Time-Bound: Our proposed project is a three-day workshop and revolves around health education.

Evidence or Equivalent Case

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease which could happen in anyone whether it is children, men or women. Additionally, it could also occur within any country, region and climatic conditions. Therefore, as per the nursing perspective, several workshops had been held by the governments of the countries. A similar case of asthma workshop was in the 720-bed university teaching hospital in Karachi, Pakistan (Lalani, 2012). In Pakistan, approximately 19 per cent of children and 10 per cent of adults have affected such a non-communicable disease. However, the issues are lack of infrastructure for healthcare by the Pakistani government. In this hospital, at the time of the investigation, the investigator found that nurses did not have asthma management knowledge as well as proper information on the inhaler (Lalani, 2012). As a result, patients had poor treatment, and thus workshop requirement was proposed to train nursing staff for asthma patients effectively.

Furthermore, the project took 60 nurses from three medical-surgical units who were newly appointed (Lalani, 2012). These nurses had given information on using the inhaler correctly. The workshops taught them about asthma attacks, preventive measures and using an inhaler with correct steps. The results showed that 30 per cent of nurses were uninformed on asthma inhaling techniques. However, workshops helped teach new nursing staff health education as per standard guidelines.

Similarly, another workshop for school nurses had conducted so that asthma attacks could have effective prevention. It was implemented in the School at Denver, Colorado, by taking school staff, nurses and clinicians into consideration. Furthermore, this workshop included training of nurses to use inhalers, traditional school health system awareness, asthma management and evaluation of asthma control (Kakumanu, and Lemanske, 2019). Another study had conducted to gather information on 100 participants knowledge. The project members gave a questionnaire to complete a healthcare professional asthma knowledge and consumer asthma knowledge (Basheti, Hamadi, and Reddel, 2016). This workshop identified the people knowing about inhalers; asthma medicines are control management. Hence, the purpose was to gather how much knowledge nursing practitioners have on self-management.

Therefore, similar workshops are held by the governments of countries to improve their healthcare services, whereas nurses are becoming aware of asthma management and control practices. Several times doctors are unavailable whenever a patient comes into hospital premises. Therefore, it is vital to educate them for a non-communicable chronic respiratory disease like Asthma. All the equivalent studies reveal that after workshops, nurses are now well aware of management asthma affected patients in a very successful manner.

Theoretical Overview

Budget

The budget for the proposed project is organising the workshops for nursing practitioners and healthcare professionals. Therefore, no additional expense will be required to conduct a three-day workshop.  The Asthma Society of India, as well as Apollo Hospitals, will equally fund for attending a workshop at premises. Moreover, the nurse practitioners, at times of their lectures, will have asthma equipment demonstration.

Additionally, a higher professional and experienced nurse caregiver will be appointed to give information. Whereas, additional resource cost to train nurses is also into consideration. Hence, on selected professional and resource value will be covered in the budget.  The Government of India has decided to fund lower-income families to access the asthma devices (“The Global Asthma Report 2018”, 2018). However, we should note that a lack of programs for asthma management does impact the conditions of patients adversely. Still, standard guidelines are asthma present as a joint imitative by Indian Chest Society (ICS) and the National College of Chest Physicians (NCCP) for the general physicians working in hospitals (Koul and Patel, 2015). Therefore, the budget does not have many expenses; however, supported by NGOs and hospital expense itself.

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