Background: Uncontrolled severe asthma has a significant effect upon National Health Service provisions due to regular visits to emergency departments, hospital admissions and overreliance upon rescue therapies. Additionally, uncontrolled asthma can have a devastating impact upon a patient?s quality of life. Through the Rapid Uptake Products programme and Pathway Transformation Funding, an Asthma Nurse Educator (ANE) was employed as part of a secondary care project to improve patient access to asthma biologics.

Aims and objectives: This project hypothesised that primary care asthma education would improve overall asthma care in the local health economy and increase the number of appropriate referrals into secondary care.

Methods: The ANE delivered asthma education to primary care clinicians in a variety of formats, and using a search tool, assisted with the identification and review of suspected severe asthma patients. Using a short pre and post knowledge questionnaire, data was collected on clinician confidence in managing uncontrolled asthma, 56 responses were recorded.

Results: During a nine month period using a search tool, 711 at risk patients over 33 practices were identified and reviewed by the ANE. This generated 160 new patient referrals into the Severe Asthma team for management. Prior to the project, 58 patients received asthma biologic therapy; this has now increased to 175 patients. After asthma education delivery to 27 practices, confidence scores from all respondents significantly increased across all aspects of asthma care included within the knowledge questionnaire.

Conclusion: Education and early identification has played a pivotal role in improving patient access to asthma biologics.