Showing posts with label Self-Care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self-Care. Show all posts

Friday, 21 March 2014

COPD: can patients’ quality of life be improved?








Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, as the name suggests, is characterized by a chronic airflow obstruction in the bronchi and in contrast to asthma, this limitation is poorly reversible and progressively worsens. The diagnosis of COPD is based on spirometry, a test available to primary care and nurses trained in the technique. According to an EPI-SCAN study of 2006-2007, the prevalence of COPD in the Spanish population aged 40 to 80 years is 10.2% (95% CI 9.2-11.1), with a stronger presence in men than in women (Soriano, 2010).

To better understand how you can relieve the daily lives of patients with this chronic disease, I have chosen a systematic review, not a meta-analysis, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2007.

Monday, 3 March 2014

Healthcare for diabetics: Is the Spanish model good enough?








Diabetes mellitus type 2 has a prevalence of 8% in the general population and 20% in over 65, and if you consider all the complications that arise, it is clear that this is a chronic disease that occurs most in everyday life of health systems. So, having the issue of diabetes well addressed is very important.

The Spanish model of primary health care included, since the beginning of its reform in the early 80s, a holistic model of diabetes care, with timely support from the endocrinologists and probably for this reason, the results recorded today are very satisfactory. See it in the OECD report of 2011, that when the rate of hospitalisations for admissions due to poorly controlled diabetes is analysed, Spain shows the lowest rate out of a group of 24 countries.



On the left side of the graph, where the accumulated data is, we can see that the admission of 3.3 per hundred thousand inhabitants and the year recorded in Spain represents half of the second country on the list, Israel, one-fifth of that of Portugal, one sixth of the U.S. and the UK, and so on, towards the worst performance in the series, which are those of Austria, with admissions of 187.9 per hundred thousand inhabitants a year.