Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Management

Within the healthcare field, physicians, nurses, CNA’s, etc. all have specific instruments, protocols, interventions, that each needs to follow in order to do their job correctly. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) management is one protocol that is very common within today’s world due to many people smoking. COPD is a lung disease “characterized by persistent airflow limitation that is usually progressive and associated with an enhanced chronic inflammatory response in the airways and the lung to noxious particles or gases”(Global Initiative For Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease, 2015). This type of disease causes the patients to have breathlessness while performing their daily activities. It is usually associated with chronic
& Case-Lo, C, 2014). It was created in 1998 to educate people on COPD and to try to shed light on treatments for COPD (Jovinelly, J. & Case-Lo, C, 2014). GOLD was focused on worldwide understanding of the disease and created its first issue of the official guidelines of COPD in 2001. Every year the GOLD guidelines are updated to new evidence based findings (Jovinelly, J. & Case-Lo, C, 2014). The 2014 issue focused on updated medicine treatments. GOLD does not focus on the improvement of lung function through treatment (Jovinelly, J. & Case-Lo, C, 2014). It focuses on how the “intervention helps the quality of life” for the patient with COPD (Jovinelly, J. & Case-Lo, C, 2014). The people who are in charge of GOLD are Dr. Roberto Rodriguez-Roisin and Dr. Jorgen Vestbo. Both doctors talk about how “COPD patients shouldn’t be evaluated only by lung function tests,” there should be others aspects of the disease to look at, which is why GOLD guidelines go into many different characteristics in managing the disease (Jovinelly, J. & Case-Lo, C,
The guidelines help with focusing more on the intervention and quality of life of the patient rather than just the lung quality tests. The patients within these guidelines get instant treatment due to the recommendations that are present under each intervention. The GOLD guidelines being global also are very important because it gives an understanding that is prevalent around the