Welcome to the Recess Room podcast.

Five, four, three, two, one, fire.

So hi, and welcome back to The Recess Room podcast. I'm Simon Lang.

I'm Rob Fenwick, and I'm James Yates.

And this is the second of the series of

Roadside to Reesis, which is basically podcast episodes which are trying to really draw together

our different experiences in acute care of patients. So I'm an emergency medicine consultant. Rob is an

ACP with a nursing background in emergency medicine and James is a critical care paramedic.

So a huge thanks, first of all, for the great feedback from our first episode, Acute Heart Failure.

It's absolutely brilliant to hear all your thoughts on the episode, and we hope to bring you lots more useful stuff over the next few episodes.

And again, a big thanks to our sponsors

Abrak for making it all possible, and especially for making James's voice sound that little bit

crisper with a load of new equipment that's just given him. So, we will kick off with our next topic,

then, which is asthma. So, asthma is something that we will all see, be that

pre-hospital or in hospital, day in and day out. The majority of patients we see are going to be

presenting with quite mild presentations of asthma, and the management is going to be relatively simple,

but really, really important.

But that severity of illness really does stretch up to the critically unwell patient.

And a recent inquiry found that there were 200 deaths per year in the UK due to asthma.

So essentially asthma is an inflammatory condition of the airways, causes bronchon

constriction, and essentially patients present with exacerbations of their asthma with a wheeze,

shortness of breath and a real difficulty breathing. The presentation of someone with an acute

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