Despite the development of new asthma medicines and treatment, asthma morbidly continues to rise. This is especially true for the urban, poor, minority population. Other modalities of intervention must be tried in order to change the rise in asthma morbidity. Studies have demonstrated that asthma education improves the asthmatic's course of disease. Studies have also demonstrated that removal of common indoor asthma triggers leads to a reduction in inpatient visits and use of rescue medications. The broad, long-term objective of the proposed project is to reduce the morbidity associated with environmentally triggered asthma in urban, economically disadvantaged communities. In order to achieve this objective, this project proposes to develop a model, comprehensive community asthma prevention program by combining, expanding, and disseminating two well-established programs of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP) into a comprehensive asthma program run in the community with community involvement. This will be accomplished through partnership of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Primary Care Department, with the community-based Children's Services, Inc.(CSI) Family Centers and environmental scientists at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (E&ES). The central hypothesis of the proposed research is this: A comprehensive self-sustaining community-based asthma prevention program that involves the partnership of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's CAPP, CSI Family Centers, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, with its included Institute of Environmental Studies, will lead to a reduction in asthma morbidity and an improved quality of life for members of that community.
The specific aims are: 1) create a comprehensive asthma prevention program by combining home asthma education with home asthma trigger removal into one comprehensive asthma prevention program to be offered to members of CSI Family Centers and CHOP primary care families who live in West and Southwest Philadelphia, 2) evaluate 300 families enrolled into this comprehensive asthma prevention program over the course of four years for decreased hospitalizations, decreased emergency room visits, and improved quality of life, 3) increase asthma educational activities offered within the Family Centers, 4) train Parent Asthma Scholars to conduct asthma classes within the CSI Family Centers through the train-the-trainer model which has proven successful for CAPP.
| Bryant-Stephens, Tyra; Kurian, Cizely; Guo, Rong et al. (2009) Impact of a household environmental intervention delivered by lay health workers on asthma symptom control in urban, disadvantaged children with asthma. Am J Public Health 99 Suppl 3:S657-65 |
