‘Mindful Hand’ – anxiety and breathlessness management tool

Quality Improvement Poster Download

Background & Problem

After some patients helped manage their respiratory panic attacks using ‘The Calming Hand Tool’, there was no tool to help prompt and educate patients experiencing longer term anxiety with longer term management techniques that would help reduce the risk of panic attacks and anxiety. The aim is to help patients to have more autonomous control and self-management of their anxiety related respiratory distress.

• To facilitate palliative patients to have better self-management of anxiety with breathlessness.
• To aid the palliative patient to have better symptom control and more comfort and quality of life.
• To compliment and reduce the need for drug management for anxiety related to respiratory distress.
• To empower palliative patients with their own symptom management.
• To up-skill palliative patients, families, friends and MDT to help management symptoms of anxiety with breathlessness.

Aim

To enable 80% of palliative patients referred to therapy with anxiety related respiratory distress in palliative and oncology inpatients services at CGH & with Hannah Colgan (PT) in-patient respiratory services at GRH, to self-manage their symptoms using ‘The Mindful Hand Tool’ by April 2018.

Method

Outcome Measure

• Number of palliative patients that use ‘The Mindful Hand Tool’.
• Feedback from palliative patients on how useful they have found the tool. (1-10 scale and whether they would use it again).
• Number of patients and families that found it useful.

Process Measures

• Number of families and friends who were shown the tool and feedback?

Balancing Measures

• Total referral numbers of palliative patients and total number of ‘Mindful Hand’ patient users.

Results

Over 80% of the patients and families who used the tool have found the tool useful. It has been shown to help with patient self-management and family support of anxiety and breathlessness.

Implications

The following lessons were learnt:

• That it needs to be a very simple and quick feedback form for fatigued palliative patients.
• That patients and families benefited from another option of techniques that helped calm anxiety.
• The ‘Mindful Hand’ complimented the ‘Calming Hand’ with anxiety management.
• To launch the ‘Mindful Hand’ Trust wide to be used with anxiety management techniques.
• To take the ‘Mindful Hand’ anxiety management tool to the RCOT conference and present the work done with it.