Childhood Asthma Case Plan: Justifies Best Practices (Essay Sample)

“Childhood Asthma” Implementation of Case Management Plan
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Childhood Asthma” Implementation of Case Management Plan
Introduction
Approximately 23 million people in the USA and 9 million in the UK are affected with asthma, with children infections accounting for 30%. Most developed countries have established national and state clinical guidelines to facilitate the management of childhood asthma. Most of these guidelines are based on international best practices. One of the widely used clinical guidelines in the management of childhood asthma is the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) which is a part of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The clinical guidelines provide five key principles that should guide the management of asthma. These principles include:
1 The patient should be treated with long-term control medications to prevent asthma attacks.
2 The patients and the healthcare provider should develop an Asthma Action Plan
3 Physicians should ensure the patient has short-acting bronchodilator agents to treat asthma attacks.
4 The multidisciplinary team should work to remove the environmental triggers where it is possible.
5 International best practices also recommend that a healthy school environment, physical education, activity opportunities, and asthma education be provided to the child, family, school nurses, and social workers.
6 The management process should also ensure other triggers are managed them effectively.
Asthma best management practices dictate that effective asthma interventions should focus on improving the delivery of health care while preventing asthma episodes and promoting improved member outcomes. Patients can benefit immensely from management programs that are designed to improve self-management, enhance health status and reduce unnecessary utilization of medications. Despite the presence of national guidelines in different countries, adherence to quality asthma care remains suboptimal in USA, UK, Australia, and other developed countries. Adherence also differs with race and sociodemographic factors.
Case management
The aim of the individualized case management should be to facilitate families in the daily management of asthma symptoms through personalized care plans. The personalized care plan should integrate home visits, physical and environmental assessments, patient education that deals with the cultural and language needs, follow-ups after discharge and referral to specialty services. Supported self-management, including a personal asthma care plan, reduces the emergency to use the health facilities and improve asthma control. Most of the international guidelines prioritize the establishment of a patient-physician partnership to help children living with asthma to take control with the necessary guidance from healthcare practitioners and recommend the provision of self-management education. However, a large proportion (30%) of people living with asthma have individualized care plan (Kwok, Dinh, Dinh& Chu, 2009).
Clinical pathways
Different health facilities have different asthma clinical pathways. However, the various pathways have numerous similarities. The clinical management starts with asthma diagnosing. Any child with airflow episodic obstruction is characterized with coughing, sneezing, and shortness of breath that is partially reversible with a bronchodilator. Further tests are conducted to rule out other causes of obstruction, including cystic fibrosis, recurrent aspiration, sinusitis, airway anomalies, and foreign body aspiration. After an asthma diagnosis is confirmed, the healthcare professional conducts an assessment of its severity. A persistent asthma is diagnosed when a child exhibit any of the following symptoms: the symptoms are seen more than twice a week during the day or twice per month at night, the symptoms limit any form of exercise, FEV1 is less than 80% and two or more steroid bursts for asthma in one year (Pinnock et al., 2015). The clinical assessment includes the evaluation of the severity of the current symptoms and recent use of bronchodilators and exposure to triggers. The clinician also obtains an exacerbation asthma history, including emergency department visits, hospitalization in the past years, and ICU admissions if any. The history allows the physician to classify asthma as intermittent or persistent (Fisher-Owens, Boddupalli&Thyne, 2011). A physical examination is then conducted to rate the quality of evidence. Physical examination involves the evaluation of a cough, tachypnea, wheezing, and low oxygen saturation. The physical examination is followed by a laboratory a...