New guide educational Audiovisual directed to patients with COPD and their families.

-The guide consists of five chapters in audio-visual support and additional material which addresses all aspects about COPD

Spain, 2011-July the guide educational Audiovisual for patients with COPD and their families, by SEPAR and sponsored by Nycomed and MSD respiratory, is an educational guide on DVD that teaches a series of concepts and skills, with the aim of getting patients to cooperate in their treatment and rehabilitation and reduce your anxiety to the disease.

This guide, presented in the framework of the forty-fourth Congress of SEPAR recently held in Oviedo, aims to promote the well-being of patients with COPD and their family members/caregivers in response to the needs of knowledge and just-in-time training. In addition, provides information about the physical process and factors of stress for the patient and the caregiver, and is provided to the patient’s techniques and skills to facilitate the incorporation of healthy lifestyle habits that have proven to reduce exacerbations and slow down the progression of the disease. Another objective is to educate the patients how they affect risk factors their prognosis and evolution, get patients to cooperate in their treatment and rehabilitation (model empowerment) and reduce their anxiety to the disease.

Guide has a duration of 50 minutes and consists of forty minutes of literary history and ten minutes for annexes. The contents of the Guide are structured into chapters and it is possible to navigate between them, so that they can select the chapters of the guide that most interest you in every moment and review them as many times needed.

Consists of five chapters: information about COPD diagnosis, how to live with the disease, aggravation, and when the disease progresses; also has additional content explaining in what consists the inhalation technique, breathing physiotherapy and indications to quit smoking.

The COPD, a highly disabling disease

The chronic nature of the disease and disabling symptoms that produces many times people care to a relative or a friend are forced to accept large physical, emotional, and social responsibilities that often cause situations that overflow their capacity of attention and care to not understand or know handle the after-effects of the disease.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease primarily associated with tobacco that is characterized by the difficulty of the passage of air by the bronchi. This term describes two related lung diseases: chronic bronchitis and pulmonary emphysema. In addition to affecting the lungs, COPD also can cause other health problems, being the most frequent high blood pressure, ischemic heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, osteoporosis and ansiedad-depresión.

COPD is a serious problem of public health is not something novel. Spain, Studio IBERPOC is the prevalence of this disease by 9.1% in persons aged 40-69 and EPI-SCAN makes 10.2 per cent for a population of 40 to 80 years of age. What is surprising, according to this study, the high degree of under-diagnosis (73%) and below treatment (54%) of the disease in Spain, as well as the fact that the patients who were diagnosed had a more severe illness, increased consumption accumulated of snuff and worse quality of life related to the health.