[Home respiratory care]

In 1980, 11,000 French patients were given home respiratory care (HRC); today there are ten times more cases, i.e. about 120,000. There are two principal conditions in this population: chronic severe lung disease (CSLD), treated mainly with long-term oxygen therapy and assisted ventilation, and sleep apnoea syndrome (SAS), treated with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a treatment that first became available in 1985. The mean age of patients with CSLD is currently 67 years and is increasing annually, while for SAS it is 58 years. The constraints of treatment, prescribed for the rest of the patient's life, are incompatible with long-term hospitalization, given the daily length of treatment (12-24 h for CSLD, and 5-8 h at night for SAS). The number of medical and social workers involved in providing these types of treatment requires complex coordination for the patient to be able to benefit from such highly cost-effective medical and technical services. In the case of home respiratory care, France has benefited for almost twenty years from the services of a not-for-profit network that comprises a national coordinating body, ANTADIR, and regional HRC services administered by physicians specializing in pneumology or resuscitation, often from university hospitals.