Building the capacity of child care providers to care for children with asthma

While much attention has been made to educate the K-12 community about asthma, little has been developed to address the growing numbers of young children with asthma who spend most of their day in a child care setting. Breathe California Golden Gate Public Health Partnership, in collaboration with the San Francisco Asthma Task Force and the San Mateo County Asthma Coalition has developed a curriculum, “All about Asthma”, created for child care providers to give them the information, skills, and tools to care for children with asthma.

All About Asthma is a four hour workshop designed to educate child care providers about both asthma management, and environmental health hazard which affect all children in the child care setting. To date this curriculum has been adopted by City College of San Francisco as a credited course and is offered as a staff training in many home based and child care centers. To respond to the diverse needs of our communities the tools and curriculum have been adopted into Spanish and Chinese. Our ultimate goal is for this program to be institutionalized within child care settings, where it will continue to build the capacity of child care providers to practice good asthma management and create and maintain healthy environments for all children.