Improper Use of Inhalers

Improper Use of Inhalers in Asthma and COPD
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Improper Use of Inhalers in Asthma and COPD
Improper use of inhalers bears significant impacts on disease management by the patients. Multiple ED visits occur due to poor drug effectiveness or decreased drug delivery from improper use of inhalers. Various pieces of literature have been published to address the challenge of improper use of inhalers among asthma and COPD patients. Effectively, the publications tend to emphasize the causes of the improper use of inhalers with insights instilled in finding solutions.
Common Mistakes
There are notable challenges with the use of inhalers bearing the incorrect usage by patients. Bosnic-Anticevich et al. (2018) are among the scholars who have addressed the issue through a range of lenses. In the study “Identifying Critical Errors: Addressing Inhaler Technique in the Context of Asthma Management,” Bosnic-Anticevich et al. (2018) insist that the steps that patients do not follow incorrectly mark some of the adverse impacts in the use of inhalers. Bosnic-Anticevich et al. (2018) primarily note that the inhaler techniques that have not changed over the years bear impacts on asthma control. In their findings, proper inhaler techniques enhance adequate asthma outcomes. Delivering verbal inhaler technique to patients affect their usage and the outcomes that they incur. Unfortunately, as many as 25% of asthma and COPD patients have not received the technique education. That has led to specific usage problems in various areas.
There are also specific problems associated with inhalers that stakeholders in healthcare have not addressed efficiently. Bosnic-Anticevich et al. (2018) cite variety as among the biggest challenges in the use of inhalers. Patients are accorded a variety of inhalers, with each brand commanding different instructions for efficient use. There are also some steps that patients are likely to ignore while using inhalers. With little emphasis put on standardizing the inhalers and their applications, the chances are high that more people will ignore critical steps while others fail to understand the user manuals of individual brands. There are further variations in the application of inhalers depending on the types used. As noted, different inhalers come with varying instruction manuals. Such variations result in approximately 4 to 94% of patients using the inhalers wrongly, depending on the brand. Some of the errors that are linked with improper application of inhalers include failure to execute a forceful and deep inhalation, incorrect rotation sequence, incorrect positioning of the inhaler, failure to breath-hold after inhalation, and failure to exhale before actuation.
The need to explore erroneous steps has attracted the inputs of different scholars in an attempt to find solutions to standardization issues with the use of inhalers. Chogtu et al. (2017) evaluated the relationship between inhaler technique and asthma control to ascertain the difficulty in implementing the standards. Chogtu et al. (2017) noted the value of inhaler techniques in patients with asthma keeps deteriorating, thereby leading to poor quality of health among such patients. The findings of the study...