COPD Patient Education

Patient education is described as any set of devised educational undertakings created to improve patients’ health. Its main objective is to conserve or to improve the health of the patient or, in some cases, to slow down the progression of the disease process. However, patient education goes beyond the main objective. An informed and educated patient can actively contribute in his or her own therapy, improve results, help detect mistakes before they happen, and decrease length of hospital stay. There are several patient education opportunities that a respiratory therapist (RT) can initiate, including but not limited to: diagnostic procedural, home care, pulmonary rehabilitation, COPD exacerbation, and smoking cessation. For various reasons,
Acute exacerbations is the most common reason for hospital admissions and death among patients with COPD. An RT can educate patients about COPD exacerbation by helping them recognize the symptoms of exacerbation, e.g. increased dyspnea from their baseline, changes in the amount and color of their mucus, and the ability to recognize when it is time to call their doctor. All people with COPD who are at risk of an exacerbation should be given a self-management plan which enables them to recognize any flare up of symptoms and treat them promptly, and there is evidence to say that these plans can help reduce the risk of a serious exacerbation and the need for hospital admission (Bostock-Cox, 2014, p.
Hospitalization is a convenient time to pursue smoking cessation efforts because patients have had to temporarily stop smoking due to the prohibition of smoking at the hospital. To add, hospitalization usually results in an opportunity to teach smoking cessation to patients as the diagnosis or the exacerbation of a disease process usually makes patients more obliging, especially if their disease is related to their smoking. Though it may be difficult for some to quit, RTs can describe specific long-term benefits of smoking cessation to patients, e.g. it reduces the risk of cancer and several other diseases, such as heart disease, ischemic stroke and COPD. Education includes providing smokers with self-help books in which the RT would summarize and review the book along with the patients. Smoking cessation education also includes the RT offering safe, helpful pharmacological treatments, e.g. nicotine replacement