20 March 2017

The fifth meeting of the ILD Support Group took place at St Georges Hospital on Monday 20th March 2017  between 16:30 – 18:00.

Today we were delighted to welcome Jennifer Brimley, Respiratory Specialist Nurse, who gave a talk entitled ‘ILD Symptom Management‘. As you can imagine with such a title it covered a very wide and varied treatment of this heterogeneous group of respiratory conditions. The full presentation can be viewed at the end of this post.

These sessions are quite informal and as such encourage participants to ask questions and share their own experiences, which are always very interesting and enlightening – this session was no different! A lively discussion followed the presentation and we just had sufficient tea, coffee and biscuits to see us through to 6pm.

Jennifer also discussed the purpose of ambulatory oxygen, which can be a great benefit for some ILD patients. Rather than a treatment to reduce breathlessness its primary purpose is to increase the levels of oxygen in the blood as not all breathlessness episodes relates to low oxygen. Some other common causes of breathlessness are:

• Anxiety
• Infections
• Low fitness levels, which causes the body to use more oxygen than it would normally require.

You can view the slides from the presentation below. Use the ‘space bar‘ to pause/play the presentation.

Useful links from the above presentation:

IPF Care Patient Support Program

Improving Access to Psychology Therapies (IAPT): www.Wandsworthiapt.nhs.uk

Telephone only consultation : 020 3513 6264