Despite a strong evidence-base for the efficacy of asthma care intervention programs in reducing asthma morbidity among low-income minority children, gaps remain in our understanding of how best to translate and scale up these efficacious interventions into sustainable, broad-based programs that reduce known asthma health disparities. Head Start (HS) serves over one million low income children each year by focusing on early learning, physical health, and family and is committed to implementing evidence based programs to promote overall child wellbeing. It is unknown how to best scale up and implement these evidence based asthma interventions into low resource community organizations that serve children at risk. Implementation strategies are frequently developed atheoretically and may not be tailored to the setting. MD ABC Asthma is a multilevel asthma program that includes both staff and family asthma education training as well an integrated care with medical providers. The overall purpose of this project is to inform best practices of implementation of an asthma education program by 1) systematically evaluating the use of intervention mapping to develop a tailored implementation strategy in partnership with Head Start stakeholders, 2) examining both staff and organizational level determinants associated with implementation of MD ABC Asthma, and 3) evaluating the success of tailored implementation strategies on implementation outcomes and school absences and other health outcomes.. As part of this implementation, we will conduct a multiphase sequential mixed methods study to inform and evaluate the implementation process using the Consolidated Framework of Implementation Research (CFIR).
Aim1 will focus on a pre-implementation evaluation of Head Start staff and directors to inform a tailored implementation strategy using intervention mapping.
Aims 2 will be an ongoing evaluation and support of the implementation process using a sequential mixed methods approach.
Aim 3 will identify both staff and organizational determinants of implementation outcomes to inform national scalability within Head Start. Results will identify innovative methods for implementation and sustainability in low resource settings by partnering with existing community and government agencies as well as evaluate the impact effectiveness of an integrated multilevel asthma program, school absences, asthma control, and healthcare utilization. Successful implementation of this effective intervention has the potential to be included in federal guidelines and integrated into national guidelines on management of asthma nationally through the Office of Head Start.
Despite a strong evidence-base for the efficacy of asthma care intervention programs in reducing asthma morbidity among low-income minority children, gaps remain in our understanding of how best to translate and scale up these efficacious interventions into sustainable, broad-based programs that reduce known asthma health disparities. This proposal seeks to evaluate the implementation of a multi-level Head Start education program identify innovative methods for implementation and sustainability in low resource settings by partnering with YMCA Maryland Head Start programs.
