Spacer Prescription for Asthma Patients using pMDI at a Primary Care Practice

Clinical guidelines and the best practice for asthma management recommend all patients and require some sub-groups to use a spacer with pressurised metered-dose inhalers (pMDI). However, little data is available on the rate of spacer prescriptions for asthma patients using pMDI. Therefore, a quality improvement project was conducted to evaluate the practice of spacer prescription in one primary care centre. It was found that spacers were markedly under-prescribed; the prescription rates for regular replacement spacers were especially inadequate. Measures can be implemented in primary care settings to bring the spacer prescription practice closer to guidelines and best practice, and several suggestions were made.