Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #111796

Edward Thomas, BA, Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Divsion of Maternal, Child and Family Health, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, 2100 West Girard Ave/, PNH #3, Philadelphia, PA 19130-1400, 215-685-2790, Edward.Thomas@phila.gov, Carla Campbell, MD, MS, Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Division of Early Childhood, Youth and Women's Health, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, 2100 West Girard Ave., PNH Building #3, Philadelphia, PA 19130-1400, and Richard E. Tobin, MS, MPA, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, Philadelphia Department of Public Health, 2100 W Girard Ave, PNH #3, Philadelphia, PA 19130.

HHCC is an environmental H&S program serving in-home child care providers. HHCC is modeled after Philadelphia's “HomeSafe” Project (serving children with asthma & EBLL's) and the National Center for Healthy Housing's “Home-Based Child Care Lead Safety Program”. HHCC's Health Consultant and staff provide primary and secondary prevention H&S services.

Philadelphia has over 900 regulated and possibly twice as many unregulated child care in-home providers. The State inspects only 5% of regulated homes in a given year and the City is hard pressed to inspect each home once per year. It is expected that a great many of these facilities present environmental H&S hazards to at risk children

Working with “Keystone STARS”, Pennsylvania's Child Care H&S Quality Improvement Program and “ECELS”, Pennsylvania's Child Care H&S training program, HHCC staff performs visual assessments looking for a litany of H&S hazards. The target area for these interventions has extreme poverty and deteriorated housing conditions. For primary prevention, the staff educates the provider (over several visits) about risk reduction. At the secondary prevention level, contractors remediate H&S hazards. Most hazards addressed are not regulated; those that are will be brought up to code, and in many instances will rise to the higher standards of “Caring for our Children

Various outcomes of the program will be presented: qualitative and quantitative presence of all H&S hazards, frequency and distribution of all environmental hazards, number of children with asthma, changes in baseline knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, and decreases in: CO levels, smoking, vectors, and asthma symptoms.

Learning Objectives: