BTS asthma discharge care bundle: 2016

The purpose of care bundles is to ensure that every patient receives the best possible care every time. Their value in reducing hospital standardised mortality across 13 diagnoses has been demonstrated in UK hospital settings.¹

A care bundle:

• is a structured way of improving care and patient outcomes
• is a small set of evidence-based interventions form a cohesive unit of actions that must all be completed to achieve best outcomes
• focuses on how care is provided as much as on what care is delivered
• is easy to monitor
• allows a focus on a small number of measurable strategies aimed at improving specific outcomes
• allows standardisation of practices and reduces variation in treatment of patients
• is easy to develop but challenging to implement. One aid is the PDSA cycles: plan, do, study, act.

Asthma

There are a number of avoidable factors associated with asthma deaths as identified in The National Review of Asthma Deaths (NRAD) report Why asthma still kills (a resource accessible on this web portal). This report makes a number of recommendations to reduce the number of deaths and to improve care.

The BTS has developed a Discharge Care Bundle for asthma, drawing on recommendations from NRAD, guidelines and quality standards for asthma, the report of the BTS pilot care bundle project and from input from various societies and groups. It is to be used primarily for discharging patients (adults and children) with an acute asthma attack/exacerbation, when the usual criteria for discharge have been met.

It is hoped that the bundle will help patients to manage their asthma and reduce hospital admissions.

Reference

1. Robb E, et al. Using care bundles to reduce in-hospital mortality: quantitative survey. BMJ 2010;340:c1234