NHS ‘letting down asthma sufferers’
Today is World Asthma Day, and the National Asthma Campaign (NAC) has chosen the day to launch a campaign demanding better NHS services for asthmatics.
It claims that four million people in Britain are struggling with asthma unnecessarily because the NHS is not providing high enough care standards.
NAC also claims that 74% of the 5.1million people in the UK who have asthma face restrictions on their quality of life. The NAC says that the majority of them could be living symptom free with proper healthcare management.
As part of the campaign to change this, it has called for individuals to lobby their local political representatives and call for the Government and the NHS to prioritise the care of asthma.
An ‘Asthma Charter’ has also been drawn up of ten rights which the campaign believes all sufferers to have.
The campaign’s chief executive Donna Covey remarked: “We want people with asthma to use this charter as a checklist, in order to obtain the standards of care to which they are entitled.”
“If people think they are not getting the rights set out in the charter, they should discuss it with their GP or nurse at a special appointment, or call our Asthma Helpline to speak to a specially trained asthma nurse.”
Among the ten ‘rights’ outlined are access to a local health professional with specific asthma training, accurate and quick diagnoses, the development of a ‘personal asthma plan’ and for a review of the problem at least once a year.
