Healthy environments for children with asthma: Using lay health educators and student educators in the community-lessons learned

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Tyra Bryant-Stephens, MD, The Community Asthma Prevention Program, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, 3535 Market St. Suite 1018, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215-590-5020, stephenst@email.chop.edu

Despite the development of new asthma medicines and treatment, asthma morbidly continues to rise. The broad, long-term objective of this project is to reduce the morbidity associated with environmentally triggered asthma in urban, economically disadvantaged communities. In order to achieve this objective, we combined and disseminated 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 has been 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. The central hypothesis of the research is that a comprehensive community-based asthma prevention program will lead to a reduction in asthma morbidity and an improved quality of life for members of that community. Through our partnership we accomplish this through the involvement of lay health educators and community partners 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 2) evaluate 300 families enrolled into this comprehensive program 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 using the train-the-trainer model which has proven successful for CAPP.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this presentation, participants will be able to describe

(a) Findings of a comprehensive community-based asthma prevention program which enrolled 270 families in a randomized controlled study
(b) Integrating urban asthma housing problems into curriculum for environmental science students in undergraduate education
(c) Lessons learned from the community

Keywords: Community Collaboration, Environmental Justice

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Environmental Justice in the Home: Strategies to Improve Public Health

The 134th Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) of APHA