Oral

Purpose: A successful Healthy homes program relies on the responsibility and dedication of owners, property managers, maintenance staff and tenants in eliminating housing-related hazards. In addition to physical renovations, interventions must include educational efforts to modify behavior of the occupants and empower them to take control of their environmental surroundings, their overall health and safety. Relevance: A well designed healthy homes program is characterized by its ability to demonstrate positive intervention results, self-managed healthier lifestyles and cost effective methodologies to show the measurable and intangible benefits of program activities.. Importance: In the last decade, some U.S States have began to reimburse the costs of environmental investigations and home visits to the homes of children with elevated blood levels of lead in their bodies. Also, reimbursement for visiting home programs is being considered by hospitals and health insurance companies based on the overwhelming data that has been collected by local health departments to show that focusing on a multi-faceted healthy homes approach to eliminating housing hazards has lowered medical costs of hospitalization for health and unintentional injuries around the home. Healthy home record-keeping should have a good combination of process and outcome evaluations. It is important to monitor how decisions about program costs will be tracked, assuring the quality of intervention data is thorough, and consistency in measuring success. The evaluation findings must be used to enhance the program’s effectiveness and ensure maximizing of existing resources. Bridging the Gap: Collecting qualitative and quantitative data and evaluating outcome measures is fundamental in convincing community about the housing health and safety hazards that can be prevented and/eliminated by embracing good housekeeping practices. The extent to which the housing interventions have impacted a community and its residents is the ultimate determinant of the success of the program and it is crucial that the reliable data be made available to the community to maintain the program’s sustainability.

Session Objectives: 1. Demonstrate a pre-/post-intervention design using the results of the visual assessments and participant surveys to measure the effects of education and interventions to reflect changes to living conditions, attitudes and behaviors before and after intervention. 2. Describe how collaborative partnerships are an effective means of leveraging resources, building and strengthening organizational capacity, integrating and coordinating them with other health and housing programs and services such as code enforcement to increase program effectiveness. 3. Formulate cost-benefit analyses to assess the success of interventional strategies in controlling housing triggers such as managing asthma and improving the quality of life and discuss why part of the healthy homes programming costs should be covered by Medicaid.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)