Importance of patient/parents education in childhood asthma.

Asthma is fairly common in pediatric age group and the suffering due to asthma continues to increase despite excellent treatments available. One of the four major components of asthma management is patient education and is critical to the success of asthma management. Reasons for continued suffering include that our management strategies are not easily understood by the patient/parents without a simple and careful approach towards this step. Eliciting common concerns and fears is the single and foremost strategy to develop a relationship of trust with the patients/parents. Making them understand about the chronic nature of asthma, need for a long-term care approach, what happens during acute attacks and where medications act are some of the important areas you should be educating about in the beginning. Then comes the skill transfer, i.e. giving them skills to monitor asthma including use of peakflowmeter and use of inhalation devices effectively. Joint development of written plans for medications is essential. Development of plans to control of asthma; jointly with them; including learning about warning signs and a plan to manage acute attack at home is also very important and patient/parents should be having an active participation. Finally, educating them how to identify asthma triggers helps as a long-term strategy to keep control over asthma with or without medications. Reminding patient/parents when to come for follow-up and what would be discussed next time are some important tricks of the trade.