PROVIDING asthma patients with a more personalised and effective model of care is the focus for University of Newcastle early career postdoctoral researcher Dr Rebecca McLoughlin.
Dr McLoughlin, who is an accredited practising dietitian, has been awarded a two-year Asthma Australia fellowship to develop a toolkit based on a new management approach called Treatable Traits.
Dr McLoughlin said current management strategies tended to treat all patients the same way, using a one-size-fits-all approach. "We know for people with asthma that their asthma is different, they have different triggers, respond to medications differently and require different medications," Dr McLoughlin said.
"With the current management approach we're finding people who are at the maximum management plan are still having asthma flare ups, still ending up in hospital and it's now been identified that it's because we're not addressing the complexity of asthma and all the other things that can play into asthma and influence how people's asthma responds to medication, or things that can make their asthma worse."
The Treatable Traits approach includes assessing patients for traits including other health conditions such as obesity; risk factors or behaviours such as being a smoker; and self management skills such as having a written action plan and using the correct inhaler technique - and providing targeted treatment for these traits.
"We have evidence to say that these traits can make someone's asthma worse," she said.
"We've shown in studies that by treating these traits it improves their asthma above the normal one-size-fits-all approach.
"In the current asthma guidelines it does touch on the importance of looking at these things, but there's no systematic way of doing that or proper guidance on how we should go about doing that."
The toolkit will comprise decision aids for both patients and clinicians, developed with their input, and more non-medical terminology.
"The idea of the clinician decision aid is to help them prioritise what traits to target first, so what traits might have the biggest impact on, for example, future risk of flare ups or the biggest impact on quality of life, or asthma control," Dr McLoughlin said.
"It's acknowledging that this is a complex model and it's trying to take some of that mental burden off clinicians to note everything about every trait and the hierarchy and for them to be able to show that to the patient to say 'I think we need to target these things first and this is why'."
She said the patient decision aid will provide them with details they need to make informed choices about their care.
"There's a lot of these traits that they might not have realised actually affect their asthma. It's about educating them 'You have these traits, these affect your asthma in these ways and by treating these it can have these benefits'... we've seen in other research that patients have said they want a more active role in their care and to be more involved in those decisions."
