Health Professionals play a key role in addressing asthma: in implementing asthma diagnostic and management practices that align with national guidelines and improve health outcomes, initiating needed systems changes and practice improvements to deliver quality care, and in partnering with patients, families, schools, workplaces and others to effectively control asthma.
Summary of Priority Messages based on EPR-3 Recommendations
- Inhaled Corticosteroids: Inhaled corticosteroids are the most effective medications for long-term management of persistent asthma, and should be utilized by patients and clinicians as is recommended in the guidelines for control of asthma.
- Asthma Action Plans: All people who have asthma should receive a written asthma action plan to guide their self-management efforts.
- Asthma Severity: All patients should have an initial severity assessment based on measures of current impairment and future risk in order to determine type and level of initial therapy needed.
- Asthma Control: At planned follow-up visits, asthma patients should review level of control with their health care provider based on multiple measures of current impairment and future risk in order to guide clinician decisions to neither maintain or adjust therapy.
- Follow-up Visits: Patients who have asthma should be scheduled for planned follow-up visits at periodic intervals in order to assess their asthma control and modify treatment if needed.
- Allergen and Irritant Exposure Control: Clinicians should review each patient’s exposure to allergens and irritants and provide a multi-pronged strategy to reduce exposure to those allergens and irritants to which a patient is sensitive and exposed, i.e., that make the patient’s asthma worse.
Resources
National Heart Lung Blood Institute
National Asthma Education and Prevention Program
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
National Association of School Nurses
National Jewish Hospital – go to ‘For Professionals’