Latino Health Initiative Asthma Management Program

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

The Latino Health Initiative’s (LHI) Asthma Management program seeks to reduce asthma related emergency room visits and hospitalization rates of Latino children living in Montgomery County by increasing awareness, providing education, and empowering Latino families to properly self- manage their child’s asthma. The program provides free culturally and linguistically appropriate asthma management interventions for parents and caregivers in Spanish to help families with children to properly manage their child’s asthma. Program participants learn about the environmental factors that can cause or worsen asthma symptoms, and how to eliminate them or reduce their impact. Due the COVID-19 pandemic and unexpected restrictions announced in March 2020, the Asthma Management program was able to respond promptly by taking its classroom-based curriculum and developing an innovative virtual intervention consisting of a series of seven weekly one-hour educational group sessions, four 30-minute individual coaching sessions per participant, and one one-hour long virtual home environment assessment per participant. The program is delivered by a group of asthma coaches who are training by LHI staff in asthma basics, coaching, active listening, motivational interview, co-facilitation of virtual small groups, use of virtual platforms and of social media strategies for outreach and recruitment. Since 2020, the Asthma Management program has educated 116 parents/caregivers, provided 464 coaching sessions, and assessed 114 home environments. An end-of-program evaluation assessed the effectiveness of the interventions reporting an increase in asthma knowledge from 65% to 89%, self-efficacy from 44% to 94%, having an action plan from 29% to 88%, reduction in overall asthma morbidity measured by a decrease in emergency department visits from 31% to 19%, hospitalizations from 17% to 3%, school days missed from 76% to 24%, and restriction of physical activity from 72% to 46%.