Raising the bar in asthma management

Asthma is the most common long-term condition, affecting about 5.4 million people in the UK (Asthma UK, 2018). What is less commonly known is how very deadly it is, with someone in the UK experiencing a potentially life-threatening asthma attack every 10 seconds (Asthma UK, 2018).

The National Review of Asthma Deaths (NRAD), commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership on behalf of NHS England, systematically reviewed deaths from asthma over a 12-month period, from 1 February 2012, and subjected them to an in-depth and confidential enquiry involving multiple disciplines (Royal College of Physicians, 2014). The review investigated the individual circumstances surrounding these deaths, with the aim of decreasing this death rate.

For many years, the asthma death rate in the UK had been stagnant at around 1200 deaths per year, 90% of which were acknowledged to involve preventable factors. However, more than 5 years after the publication of the NRAD report, not only is the asthma death rate not declining, but it is no longer even stagnant, and is actually on the rise, having reached 1400 deaths in 2018 (The Pharmaceutical Journal, 2019).