Improving Asthma Communication in Minority Families

Children with persistent asthma are often not receiving regular preventive asthma care despite experiencing frequent asthma symptoms. When linked to timely and appropriate asthma medication use, good physician-parent-child communication is associated with a decrease in asthma morbidity and mortality. Removing obstacles to preventive asthma care and improving communication between the parent-children and PCP are two necessary prerequisites to improving asthma outcomes in low-income minority children.

We, the researchers at Johns Hopkins University, hypothesize that a culturally-tailored parent and child asthma communication intervention (ACI) designed to teach parent and child communication skills for use with their health care provider regarding asthma symptom severity, medication use, personal goal of treatment and quality of life issues will significantly reduce emergency room utilization for asthma care. We propose to compare this parent/child asthma communication intervention (ACI) to a developed standard asthma education intervention (SAE) designed to increase basic asthma self-management.

This study will advance nursing science by improving asthma self-management for school age children, who may be self-administering their asthma medications, yet not participate in receiving information or making their own medical decisions regarding their asthma. The proposed study is targeted at low-income minority school-aged children with evidence of poorly controlled, high-risk asthma. If successful, this intervention could have significant practical applications as a component of asthma nurse-case management, to practice currently being employed by many managed care groups across the country as an intervention for their high-risk/high ED use asthma patients. Because of the high prevalence and enormous health impact of asthma and the disproportionate asthma burden experienced by minority children, the outcome of the proposed study will have significant pediatric nursing applicability.

Inclusion criteria

• Age 6-12 years
• Physician diagnosis of asthma
• Reside in metropolitan Baltimore
• English speaking
• Able to read 80% of parent educational brochure in English
• Emergency Department (ED) visit within the past 12 months and can identify a primary care provider
• No other co-morbid pulmonary disease

Exclusion criteria

• Enrolled in another asthma study