Care of the severe asthmatic paediatric patient Essay

Care of the severe asthmatic paediatric patient - Essay Example Unless severe asthma is adequately treated it can become life threatening. Treatment regimen in the case of severe paediatric asthma is giving high concentrations of oxygen to the patient, nebulized salbutamol and systemic corticosteroids. One of the most frequent causes of children being presented in hospitals is asthma. The important concern with paediatric asthma is that a significant percentage of children hospitalized with a severe attack of asthma are likely to die. This makes understanding paediatric asthma and maintaining guidelines for managing severe paediatric asthma important to the reduction of paediatric mortality in hospitality Weinberger 2008 p.633, defines asthma as a disease characterized by hyper-responsiveness of the airways to various stimuli, resulting in airway obstruction that is reversible to a substantial degree either spontaneously or as a result of treatment†. The airway obstruction observed in asthma arises from the different levels of severity of broncho-spasm and inflammation. Inflammation in asthma is the result of mucosal oedema and the secretion of mucous (Weinberger, 2008). Guill, 2004, points out that asthma does not occur as a set of episodic events spread over periods of time, but is rather present as a state of inflammation and hyper-responsiveness of the airway that presents in a varying manner in an individual suffering from asthma and also among the different individuals having asthma. Such an observation suggests the severity of an asthmatic event in a child varies from time and time and the severity of an asthmatic event is not necessarily the same between different indiv iduals (Guill, 2004). The varying severity of asthma in children gives rise to asthmatic events that may be present with minimal symptoms that have hardly any impact on the health of the child to asthmatic events with life threatening potential. The available indicators of the severity levels of asthma in children are the