British Thoracic Society

I'm your host, Jonathan Underhill, Medicines Clinical Advisor here at Prescript.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Talking Mates, where we're going to be discussing what's been going on with asthma care since the NICE Sign BTS guideline update.

Delighted to be joined today by two wonderful guests.

We welcome back Professor Anna Murphy and we say hello to Dr Toby Capstick.

So we thought it'd be interesting to find out what's happened since then really with the implementation of those recommendations.

You'll remember Anna is a professor of pharmacy practice at De Montfort University and a consultant respiratory pharmacist for University Hospitals of Leicester.

She has over 25 years experience working in the field of respiratory medicine and has contributed to national clinical guidelines, professional standards and training programmes such as the Royal College of Pharmacy work, UKCPA and the BTS Council.

She's published widely in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of the Asthma in Focus and produced the Seven Steps to Success in Halo Education materials as well, just to mention a few things that she's done.

The American Society of Hematology says four hours is long.

The British Thoracic Society says six hours is long.

And then in the United States, we say five hours is long.

So very confusing, but we'll just say it's long.

So locally, my colleague, Dr. Hillary Ted, who leads the learning disability part of our service, has been to discuss this with critical care colleagues at weekly meetings.

So we've raised it locally and been lucky enough to be asked to speak at the BTS summer meeting.

We talked about this in the CHAOS study showing better outcomes than one would have expected in patients with COPD who, who require ITU admission.

This sounds similar in terms of, as you say, nihilism in terms of expected outcomes and trying to change the culture of how we view patients with learning disabilities.

... and they want to take proactive steps to close the gap in provision, what resources could they look at?

There are a few resources out there, both national and local.

In the BTS clinical statement on community-acquired pneumonia in patients with learning disabilities, the RCP has a toolkit developed in association with the Society of Acute Medicine, and more recently there's been an NCPOD report about acute care in people with learning disabilities called Learning Together, and of course the Leader report.

And then there are some really useful resources more locally.

... thoracentesis or a small-bore chest tube.

If you go based on the latest guidelines out, I'm just gonna refer to the BTS ones, a 14 French is probably gonna do just fine.

Um, you really wanna coordinate with your colleagues with infectious disease about making sure you're sampling correctly and those appropriately broad antibiotics.

Notice how I said appropriately broad.