There are two major goals of the asthma education program. 1) Develop and evaluate the effect of programs for patients, especially urban disadvantaged children. 2) Make self-management education an integral part of health care and thus involve community based professionals in program design and implementation. This will also increase program adoption. The program's objective is to test the hypotheses that the education program: will increase children's and parents' skills and confidence in managing acute asthma, will improve health outcomes (less frequent and severe asthma), will improve use of health services (fewer emergency visits and hospitalizations, increased routine clinic appointment keeping) and will reduce health care costs. To meet the above objective, the program has two components. Task 1: Evaluate an asthma self.management education program for 6-12 year olds in the community based physician office setting. The program consists of separate books for children and their parents, slide-tape/videos, and physician discussion guides on several topics critical to effective management of asthma. The program will be field-tested in 24 physician office sites. Evaluation will use a pretest, post-test design with experimental and control groups. Children will also serve as their own controls. Task 2: Develop and evaluate an asthma family and self-management education program for 2-5 year olds. Develop comprehensive education program similar to the 6-12 year old program but with materials appropriate for younger children and their families. This will be implemented and evaluated in 16 physician sites using the same evaluation design as in Task 1.
