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peutic potential of medicine has led to rising expectations in terms of health and quality of life. This has, in turn, led to significant increases in health costs. On the other hand, this situation has stimulated the development of new technologies that are both clinically and economically viable, particularly for the treatment of chronic disease. Cost control without a reduction in the quality of health care has become a priority, along with the promotion of new intervention protocols developed specifically to deal with the complexity of all these factors. In this context, the role of nursing is fundamental. The goal of nursing has always been to act as a mediator between scientific and economic values, both supporting and augmenting them, without forgetting the dignity and importance of the patient. For the nurse, the person should always come first. Nursing process is relevant to intervention protocol formulation, especially in chronic disease care, where the clinical approach is concerned with developing long-term programs for daily self-management. These require that the patient be knowledgeable about his/her disease, allowing him/her to understand therapeutic decisions. Patients with chronic diseases should be able to access as much information as possible, allowing them to participate more actively in their treatment and to take responsibility for their disease management. The need to provide adequate patient and caregiver education has always been one of the most important aims of nursing. This allows the patient to cope with the disease, to adhere more easily to medication protocols, to learn how to solve common problems and to manage new situations, avoiding, if possible, further hospital admissions for the same problem. Patients on home long-term oxygen treatment (H-LTOT) have severe chronic respiratory insufficiency, usually characterised by progressive deterioration. These patients can have difficulty carrying out even the most simple daily activities. The patients suffer from frequent exacerbations and consequently require frequent hospital admissions, all of which result in very high social and economic costs. For more than fifteen years, our Respiratory Department has followed these patients as hospitalised outpatients, assuring that they have access to hospital assistance upon their return home. In this context, we educate, plan clinical controls, organise technical assistance and deliver medications, oxygen and health care materials. This is done with the support of a telemetric system capable of transmitting in real-time and monitoring important clinical parameters on a daily basis. When we started the project for telemetric monitoring of patients on H-LTOT in 1990, we were convinced of the need for a precise protocol [1]. This protocol has The Changing Role of Nursing in Telemetric LTOT at Home |
