Evaluating Caregiver Management of Asthma Exacerbations at Home
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract BACKGROUND: Effective management of asthma in the home setting requires asthma education from a health professional along with written plans for asthma exacerbations. These approaches can result in fewer acute asthma visits, fewer missed school days and better asthma control. Nevertheless, a large number of asthma exacerbations result in emergency department visits or hospital admission. Several studies suggest that care-givers may lack the knowledge, the skills, or the confidence to provide care for their child during an asthma exacerbation. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of caregivers who appropriately manage their child’s acute asthma at home (as per the 2014 Global Initiative for Asthma guidelines) and to identify factors that may be associated with deviations from these guidelines. DESIGN/METHODS: We studied caregivers of children who are known to suffer from asthma using a paper based questionnaire in a single-center outpatient asthma clinic. Caregivers of children aged 3 to 17 years with a physician made diagnosis of asthma greater than 6 months in duration were included. To avoid a diagnosis of bronchiolitis from our study group, new consultations for wheezing or cough without a prior diagnosis of asthma, and less than 3 years of age were excluded. For statistical analysis, we used Excel and STATA 11 for the z test of proportions and comparison of means with a one way ANOVA (a = 0.05). RESULTS: Among the 45 caregivers surveyed, most had children with well controlled asthma based on low scores from a standard asthma control test and a limited number of emergency room visits (1.5±0.1 per year). Sixty-four percent of caregivers were able to correctly identify the initial treatment with 2 puffs of Ventolin; however, 54% did not choose repeating Ventolin treatment within 20 minutes for ongoing symptoms. Moreover, only 58% of caregivers had ever been given a written asthma action plan. Caregivers had a higher degree of confidence (reported on a scale of 1-10) in initiating management (8.9±1.5) compared with stopping treatment (7.3±2.5). CONCLUSION: Despite a high degree of confidence in starting treatment for asthma attacks, half of the caregivers surveyed identified inappropriate steps to manage asthma exacerbations at home. Providing a written asthma action plan may improve caregiver confidence and knowledge in asthma exacerbation management. However, routine assessment and review by a healthcare professional is essential in reinforcing recommended behaviours for home asthma management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".