Acceso usuarios
, Iñigo Ojanguren Arranz, Rosa Cordovilla Pérez, Isabel Urrutia Landa, Ramón Agüero Balbín, Javier Guerra Aguirre, Teresa Genover, María Antonia Ramon
Background and objective Asthma control is suboptimal. The objective of this study was to reduce health care requirements and work absenteeism.
Material and methods Multicenter randomized controlled study investigating asthma control, educational parameters, health service use, and absenteeism. After adjusting treatment according to GINA recommendations, control group patients (CG) followed their physician's recommendations, while intervention group (IG) patients additionally underwent a 5-minute educational intervention. This protocol was repeated at 3 months, and a final assessment was carried out at 6 months.
Results 479 patients (mean age 40 (SD 17) years) were recruited from primary care, and 334 completed the study. Comparatively, IG patients showed an improvement at the 3- and 6-month evaluations in the six educational parameters (P < 0.001) and required fewer urgent visits to the GP for exacerbations [RR = 0.49 (95% CI 0.26�0.90); P < 0.04], and before the third evaluation, also in urgent GP visits [RR = 0.25 (95% CI 0.12�0.52); P < 0.001]. Before this third evaluation, IG had fewer scheduled visits to the GP [RR = 0.48 (95% CI 0.28�0.82); P < 0.003], and fewer visits to the primary care [RR = 0.40 (95% CI 0.18�0.87); P < 0.05], and to hospital emergency rooms [RR = 0.13 (95% CI 0.04�0.42); P < 0.001]. In addition, before the third evaluation, IG patients were less often absent from work [RR = 0.22 (95% CI 0.05�0.98); P < 0.03] or unable to work at home [RR = 0.31 (95% CI 0.12�0.82); P < 0.02].
Conclusions Two short educational interventions improved asthma education and decreased the use of health resources and work absenteeism.
