International Primary Care Respiratory Group

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Guidelines
Management of Chronic Respiratory Disease Spirometry
Spirometry Standards in Primary Care

The UK member of the IPCRG, the General Practice Airways Group (GPIAG), has published in the Primary Care Respiratory Journal (PCRJ) Diagnostic Spirometry in Primary Care: Proposed standards for general practice compliant with American Thoracic Society and European Respiratory Society recommendations. This document was developed together with the Association for Respiratory Technology & Physiology (ARTP) and Education for Health with comments from the British Thoracic Society.

Accurate diagnosis is essential for any condition in primary care. Spirometry performed in primary care forms the basis of diagnosis and differential diagnosis respiratory and other conditions. The focus of this Standards Document is the provision of high quality, reliable diagnostic spirometry in primary care. It provides detailed information for clinicians, managers and healthcare commissioners on the key areas of quality required for diagnostic spirometry in primary care – including training requirements and quality assurance. These proposals and recommendations are designed to raise the standard of spirometry and respiratory diagnosis in primary care and to provide the impetus for debate, improvement and maintenance of quality for diagnostic (rather than screening) spirometry performed in primary care. This document should therefore challenge current performance and should constitute an aspirational guide for delivery of this service.
The full document is available free online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4104/pcrj.2009.00054

In the same issue of the PCRJ there is also a paper by the IPCRG which discusses the role of case finding in improving earlier detection and identification of patients for diagnostic quality spirometry to diagnose COPD. The full paper is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4104/pcrj.2009.00055

There is also a linked editorial related to these papers by Christine Jenkins which is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4104/pcrj.2009.00057

The content of this site, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License 2002-2008 International Primary Care Respiratory Group.
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