Community Respiratory Team gets a special mention in national scheme

Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust > Community Respiratory Team gets a special mention in national scheme

The Community Respiratory Team

Last year, the Community Respiratory service was chosen to be one of seven project sites working with the National Lung Improvement Programme to improve the asthma care delivered to patients in the community.

During the last year the respiratory patient pathway was revisited and a standardised patient care approach implemented to ensure that all asthma patients referred to the service are treated in accordance with the British Thoracic Society’s SIGN guidelines on asthma.

Senior Respiratory Physiotherapist, Bal Matharu explained: “We have worked on increasing the referrals to our service and subsequently seen a 75% increase from 2010/2011 to the 2011/2012 figures.  Our data also shows we are managing these patients better in accordance with Department of Health guidelines and have seen a positive reduction in asthma patients attending A&E (29% reduction in A&E attendances and 21% reduction in asthma attendances from 2010/2011 to 2011/2012 for SGH).”

The project with the National Lung Improvement Programme came to an end on May 18th 2012, although the team will continue working with them until mid-July on the final improvement guide which will be available as a national guide for asthma improvement work.

An end of project event took place in London last May where the Sandwell team’s service was recognised for providing the best data and representation of data. Bal was keen to give credit to the involvement of Chris Small of the Business Development Unit and data analyst Mat Plant, without who the data would not have been produced to such a standard.