The healthcare professional's perspective: Diana
Diana Bilton is head of the Adult CF Unit at the Royal Brompton Hospital, London
I work with CF patients and it has always been very important for me to ensure I am effectively explaining the significance and importance of spirometry results to patients. This is particularly important for explaining the success or failure of treatment, so that patients and carers can understand how we make decisions about their treatment and for what reasons.
I find that my patients are particularly concerned with how their results compare to normal. To help them understand this, I like to explain that their forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) refers to how much they are able to blow out during the first second of the test. I then explain that if we took 100 people of the same age, height and sex and take the average score, we can look at a comparison with a statistically average person, or a “normal measurement”.
I work with a lot of teenagers who are coming through the transition phase from paediatric care to adult care. This change is very unsettling and it takes a lot of time to help our patients feel comfortable and relaxed with a different form of care.
With the spirometry equations used before the introduction of the GLI, the hardest part of this transition was patients seeing a drop in the percentage predicted results of the spirometry test. This could happen in the space of a month, without the patient seeing any change in the absolute value in millilitres of FEV1.
This would …
