Health professionals and patients are unenthusiastic about asthma self-management plans, a pilot study has found. The study explored the views of patients, nurses and general practitioners about guided self-management plans for asthma.
Little use was made of plans and a mismatch was apparent between the views of professionals and patients on what constitutes a responsible asthma patient and what patients should be doing to control their symptoms. Many patients with mild to moderate asthma did not regard their condition as a chronic disease and felt that guided self-management plans re-enforced asthma as a chronic, ongoing disease.
The study concluded that attempts to introduce self-management plans in primary care were unlikely to be successful (British Medical Journal 2000;321:1507).