Effect of Therapeutic Guidelines for Bronchial Asthma on Adult Patients' Knowledge, Practice, Compliance, and Disease Severity

Asthma places a large burden on affected patients and their families. Although asthma is a major cause of patient disability and in rare cases causes premature death, asthma morbidity and mortality are largely preventable when patients and their families are adequately educated about the disease and have access to high quality health care. That is, poor outcomes for patient asthma, such as hospitalizations and deaths, are at least partially sensitive to the quality of ambulatory health care. Aim of the study: to assess asthmatic adult needs, designing therapeutic and nutritional guidelines, and evaluating their effectiveness on improvement of the knowledge, practices, and severity of bronchial asthma as well as patient's therapeutic compliance. The research hypotheses were that asthmatic adult patients receiving the designed guidelines will have significant improvements in their knowledge, practices, severity of asthma, and compliance to therapeutic regimen. Design: a quasi experimental research design was used with pre-post assessment of outcome. It involved four steps; pre-guidelines, guidelines implementation, post-guided and follow up. Setting: The study was conducted in the outpatient clinic of bronchial asthma at Zagazig University Hospitals and Helwan University Hospitals. Subjects: The study was carried out on (60) a convenience sample of asthmatic adults consecutively recruited from the study setting, uses of inhaler. Patients with other chronic diseases were excluded. Tools: Four tools were used for data collection, 1- An Interview form, 2- An Observation check list, 3- A Compliance assessment form 4- An Asthma severity assessment scale. Results: There were statistically significant effect of bronchial asthma on patient's daily life activities, work, psychology, self-image, diet and sleep. There was Improvement in knowledge, practice, decreased level of severity of asthma and therapeutic compliance after guidelines implementation. There was a positive coefficients change in knowledge score and guidelines intervention. Also there were negative coefficients change in the severity score of bronchial asthma and Educational level and Knowledge score. The study concludes that the developed guidelines have a significant positive impact on asthma patients' knowledge, practices, therapeutic compliance, and disease severity. This success is attributed to that the guidelines are based on needs assessment and integrate updated technology. Therefore, these guidelines should be adopted as an essential component of the care provided to asthma patients. Continuous follow-up together with selecting the optimal treatment options for each individual patient are recommended. The long-term effects of following the guidelines need to be further studied. {[}Nadia M. Taha and Zeinab H. Ali. Effect of Therapeutic Guidelines for Bronchial Asthma on Adult Patients' Knowledge, Practice, Compliance, and Disease Severity. Life Science Journal. 2011; 8(3): 199-208] (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com.