EDITORIALS
Community care for COPD: the good, the bad and the ugly
Correspondence to:
Dr D M G Halpin, Department of Respiratory Medicine, Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, Exeter EX2 5DW, UK; D.M.G.Halpin@ex.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It is currently fashionable to believe that patients with chronic diseases can be managed safely, effectively and more cheaply, entirely in the community. In the UK, current commissioning and financial models encourage the development of services to provide continuing care as well as to replace acute care traditionally provided by hospitals. For some patients, this may be appropriate, but there is a danger of taking it too far and for patients to be denied appropriate input from specialists.
In the late 1990s, home care services to manage exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) were introduced in the UK, largely as a way of reducing the strain on the National Health Service’s (NHS) resources caused by the number of patients admitted during the winter months.1 It is now well recognised that some patients with exacerbations of COPD2 3 can be managed safely at home, and in fact this model of care
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Thorax 2008 63: 194-200.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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