Could you spare five minutes to tell us about your asthma care? We have launched our Annual Asthma Survey and we want to hear all about how your asthma is being managed, your experiences of getting basic asthma care over the last year and what things can trigger your symptoms. Last year more than 11,000 of you took part in the survey and we hope to beat that figure this year! Your insights will help shape the work we’re doing to make sure people with asthma get the support and treatment they need.
Only part of your reply is showing up for some reason. It’s difficult for urban living people to understand the problems of rural living, no buses, miles from a railway station, I’m 16 miles from a hospital for instance. Most of my potential air pollution comes from France!
I feel for you air pollution wise! I edited my reply as I didn’t want it to come across as a rant, because it wasn’t. Ultimately, it’s our choice to live in a rural area, but as you say there are many significant differences.
Accessing hospital in an emergency being the one that concerns me most. On the plus side, I’m extremely lucky to have an excellent asthma friendly GP.
Here air pollution is blown across from a major city & caused by farming - pollen from oil seed rape, crop spraying, dust clouds at harvest etc, as well as traffic at peak times during the day & especially on Sundays & Bank Holidays.
I appreciate that it’s difficult to compile a survey that covers everyone, especially if the person writing it isn’t familiar with the issues of rural inequality.
It’s difficult, as the survey needs to be kept brief enough that people will be willing to complete it - perhaps there could be an additional question asking if we live in a city, urban or rural location? This would allow for filtering of the results, which might identify inequalities.
At least the survey gives an overall picture of asthma for the majority of people.
I too live in a remote rural area and didn’t feel some of the questions were relevant, but hopefully I answered ok. Some of the questions I didn’t answer, like the ones asking how many times something happened in the past year. Thinking in particular of how many times you were breathless and unable to talk. The answer was supposed to be a specific number, not “more than 10” or something. In the past year??
Not a criticism, but maybe it should say more than 5 minutes to complete. I did the survey before going out,thinking I’d have plenty of time. It took me 11 minutes to answer the 55 questions and that was with me skimming through the questions because I didn’t have the time to deal with them properly. Had it said allow 20 minutes I’d have done the survey when I had the time to properly read and answer the questions.
I agree with all you’ve said, especially the time taken to complete the survey. I ended up answering “Can’t remember’ to many questions, otherwise the answers would have been completely misleading!
thanks for taking part in our Annual Asthma Survey – all of your answers provide detailed insights into asthma care across the UK and will help us across the many areas of our work. We’ve seen a few comments about the survey not having specific questions if you live somewhere rural, for example about accessing services – thanks for sharing this, we have passed this feedback on to the Policy team who design the survey so that they can review this for future editions and other surveys that we do.
Many thanks once again for taking the time to share your experiences.
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