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Severe asthma patients' life is heavily influenced by the disease, which has impact on personal and professional choices or general lifestyle. Despite the available tools to help physicians investigating the patient-reported outcomes there is a need for a more standardised and structured approach to include the evaluation of quality of life together with the emotions of patients into the routine clinical interaction. We hereby report the use of an active listening and insight approach to understand the emotions of patients with severe asthma through dedicated in-person meetings involving a group of patients with their doctors, caregivers and an external moderator. The initiative "Patients insight meeting" was organized within 17 specialist referral centres for severe asthma in Italy in 2019 and involved 149 patients. Insights related to 4 different items were collected and a task force composed by the external moderators produced a general report including the suggestions from the participating centres. This experience of group-meetings involving both patients and doctors together represents an innovative way to investigate real life experience and the emotions of asthmatic patients, highlighting unmet needs related to patient's experience of his/her disease that need to be included in severe asthmatics' management strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite major advances in the treatment of asthma and the development of several asthma guidelines, people still die of asthma currently. According to WHO estimates, approximately 250,000 people die prematurely each year from asthma. Trends of asthma mortality rates vary very widely across countries, age and ethnic groups. Several risk factors have been associated with asthma mortality, including a history of near-fatal asthma requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation, hospitalization or emergency care visit for asthma in the past year, currently using or having recently stopped using oral corticosteroids (a marker of event severity), not currently using inhaled corticosteroids, a history of psychiatric disease or psychosocial problems, poor adherence with asthma medications and/or poor adherence with (or lack of) a written asthma action plan, food allergy in a patient with asthma. Preventable factors have been identified in the majority of asthma deaths. Inadequate education of patients on recognising risk and the appropriate action needed when asthma control is poor, deficiencies in the accuracy and timing of asthma diagnosis, inadequate classification of severity and treatment, seem to play a part in the majority of asthma deaths. Improvements in management, epitomized by the use of guided self-management systems of care may be the key goals in reducing asthma mortality worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]