Chronic breathlessness reduces quality of life and is associated with increased emergency health service utilisation, triggered by episodes of acute breathlessness. This represents great distress for the patient and family and burden on the NHS – particularly the emergency services.
There are calls for integrated services across settings to improve patient experience and outcomes, to reduce use of emergency services and prevent avoidable ED attendance and hospital admission. A better understanding of the characteristics of those who require urgent admission and those who might be managed in the community pattern is needed. We are using routinely collected ED attendance data from a large region in the north of England to analyse episodes of chronic respiratory disease accessing emergency services across community and hospital settings. This will understand how services are used and identify patients suitable for community based care.
