Watch our webinar here on the new BTS/NICE/SIGN asthma guideline, aimed at improving health outcomes with the added benefit of reducing inhaler environmental impact. This long-awaited guideline will hopefully be an absolute game changer to improve the UK’s poor asthma outcomes as well as reducing the environmental impact of the inhalers we prescribe.
The webinar involves talks from speakers from Greener Practice who have been practicing in this way for some years, including Dr Aarti Bansal who developed the nationally award-winning Greener Practice High Quality and Low Carbon Asthma Care Toolkit.
We share our experiences and top tips of how we can put this new guideline into practice, including combination inhalers as Anti Inflammatory Reliever or Maintenance And Reliever Therapy, and getting away from the status quo of Short Acting Beta Agonist prescribing.
Speakers:–
Dr Aarti Bansal – How the new guidelines can help us deliver High Quality and Low Carbon asthma care
Dr Veena Aggarwal – Experience of a GP registrar Quality Improvement project to recall high SABA users and improve asthma care
You can download a summary of the expert panellists’ response to audience questions here, including frequently asked questions such as how to manage AIR therapy/MART while undertaking diagnostic tests for asthma, communicating the benefits of combination inhalers to patients, and how to go about improving asthma care in your practice. This document also contains the list of useful links copied below.
Links to some of the resources shared by the speakers:
- NICE/BTS/SIGN joint asthma guideline, published 27th November 2024
- The NICE guidance algorithms and SIGN summaries are helpful summaries to refer to on the new joint guidelines.
- The Primary Care Respiratory Society has produced a range of resources to help practices implement the new guidelines.
- Greener Practice High Quality Low Carbon asthma care toolkit, including:
- Education videos (including disease control and approach to consultation)
- Projects, including clinical searches, education videos and patient-facing resources, to improve asthma care
- Visual aid for optimising asthma reviews. One-page visual aid to support a person-centred asthma review. Ensuring patients get the right medicine (preventer) to get the right place (airways). It has hyperlinks to various resources.
- Airways diagram (links to large version). This can help to explain that the underlying problem in asthma is airway lining inflammation and hence the importance of inhaled corticosteroid as the main treatment for asthma.
- Patient Videos: Links can be incorporated into SMS/AccuRx messages and/or annual asthma review letters for all patients. They can also be sent in a targetted way to patients identified at risk of poor control.
- Asthma + Lung Inhaler technique videos can be sent in SMS/AccuRx messages after prescribing a new inhaler.
- Greener Practice has created two short animated videos: The first explains what asthma is and how to treat it, and second explains the options around inhaler device choices. Both videos emphasise prioritising disease control.
- The Clean Air Hub have a good leaflet you can give patients with respiratory conditions about the effects of air pollution and what they can do.
- You can find more info about the environmental impacts of inhalers on the Green Inhaler website
- Why Asthma Kills Report published by the Royal College of Physicians
- Breathing Unequal Report published by Asthma + Lung UK
This event was free, but it did incur some costs for Greener Practice admin. A small donation (eg the price of a cup of coffee!) would be hugely appreciated to cover the additional admin costs.