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Helping COPD patients breathe easier
He was young and trying to impress a girl he liked who’d asked him to light her up a smoke.
That decision led him to spend 20 years of his life lighting and smoking up to two packs of cigarettes a day.
Now, at 73, Ernie Davis struggles to breathe.
He is one of 7,000 Islanders with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), an affliction that leaves him so short of breath he sometimes needs to lie down after a flight of stairs.
COPD patient Ernie Davis talks about his experience with chronic disease.
Karen Sutherland shows Ernie Davis blocked and unblocked airways.
COPD patients experience shortness of breath and activity limitations because the airways of their lungs are inflamed and become blocked. Smoking is the most common cause, but air pollution and genetics can also be contributing factors.
There is no cure, but since Davis learned to manage his disease, through Health PEI’s Integrated Chronic Disease Management and Prevention Program, his quality of life has improved drastically.
The Lower Montague man visits the Montague Health Centre for meetings with other COPD sufferers who share their tips for helping to manage the disease.
Whether it’s learning the correct way to use their puffers, the importance of staying active, breathing techniques or the best postures for deep breathing, they’re learning to help themselves. The courses teach the latest information and training in COPD care and are based on Canadian Thoracic Society guidelines designed to improve early diagnosis, prevention, and management of the disease.
Karen Sutherland, RN, leads the group which has helped more than 100 Eastern Kings COPD patients breathe a little easier.
“You can see people start to open up and bounce things off each other as the weeks go on,” she said.
Since flare-ups – when the airways become inflamed and even blocked - are one of the most common reasons Islanders with COPD are admitted to hospital, Health PEI launched this program as a pilot project in 2010 to better educate patients about how to manage their disease. The main goal is to help patients manage their own disease and receive care through the local health centre, rather than visiting the emergency department and being admitted to hospital overnight.
Davis said the program – and his own action plan he shared with his pharmacist – has helped keep him out of the emergency room more than once.
The two most important things people with COPD can do to help themselves are to quit smoking and get a flu shot. Between 80 and 90 per cent of people with COPD are or were smokers. And respiratory infections can be life-threatening for people with the disease.
Knowing there is a contact person to call for information or support during the early signs of a flare-up is very reassuring.
The program is also offered at the Eastern Kings Health Centre in Souris.
The primary care nurse instructors took an intensive four-day training course to prepare them as COPD educators.
If you are a resident of Kings County and would like to get involved in the program, please call the Montague Health Center at 838-0830 or the Eastern Kings Health Center at 687-7033.
The program is available in other sites across the Province.
